Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.1 March 2020: 39-57 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0003

From “Crisis of Masculinity” to Queer History: Gender, Borders, and Body Politics in Post-Handover Crime Films

Leo Chia-Li Chu Science and Technology Studies University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract This paper will examine the ambivalences and contradictions in post-handover Hong Kong cinema through the lens of gender, border, and the body politic in three crime films. The first of them, Intruder (恐怖雞 Kongbu ji, 1997), released when sovereignty over Hong Kong had just been transferred from Britain to China, may evoke a “crisis of masculinity” through its border-crossing female antagonist; in contrast, the portrayal of women, as well as transgender and queer people, in Ming Ming (明明, 2006) and (2009), appears to be more nuanced. Reading the three films against one another and against established narratives about the city, I intend to investigate how these films adopt gendered narratives and the questions of border in the construction of identity politics in post-handover Hong Kong. By juxtaposing the fluid, unstable, and multi-faceted bodies of fictional characters with the city’s history, this paper argues that the representation of past and future in these films reflects the struggle to narrate anxiety and hope in post-handover Hong Kong.

Keywords Hong Kong, crime films, handover, gender, border, body politic

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Introduction

The development of Hong Kong cinema reflects the evolution of the city as well as the imagination and construction of its present, past, and future. A contested locus of capital and state, hegemony and heterogeneity, and different versions of imperialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, Hong Kong cinema needs to be critically situated in multiple socio-economic and political contexts, as well as in various constructed images about its border. To approach the three crime films I discuss in this paper, the representation of border-crossing criminals in the cinema of the 1980s may provide a relevant context. The focus on sensational crimes committed by gangs coming from adjacent Mainland provinces, such as the robbery depicted in Long Arm of the Law (省港旗兵 Shenggang qibing, 1984), manifested and shaped Hongkongers’ ambivalence toward China as well as their own Westernized urban society, populated mostly by first- and second-generation refugees who had themselves escaped the turmoil of the Mainland. Gangs and the police, depicted as almost indistinguishable from each other, are considered by Stephen Teo as symbols of the threats capitalism posed to traditional Chinese morality, with its “code of honor” is called into question “in the ensuing violence” triggered by corruption and greed (233). These wounded, embittered, and betrayed characters therefore juxtapose the anxiety over external forces bringing unforeseeable danger with a sense of anomie brewing inside people’s insecure bodies. In the following sections, I will elaborate on the relation between crime cinema and the cultural imagination of Hong Kong through three post-handover films: Intruder (恐怖雞 Kongbu ji, 1997), Ming Ming (明明, 2006), and I Come with the Rain (2009). It should be noted that this chronological order does not entail a “progressive narrative” in which an authentic depiction of Hong Kong will gradually emerge from imposed categories or identities. As I will argue, while the discussion of borders and the body politic in the latter films seems to be more “nuanced” and focuses more on the positive connotations of hybridity, this emphasis on the fluidity of identity can itself buttress dominant discourses about Hong Kong’s history and evade certain political questions. Wing Sang Law has rightly argued that, since socio-political narratives surrounding Hong Kong are saturated with binary oppositions and imported ideologies, attempts to move beyond the impasse can be complicit in the “unreflective recycling of reified categories” embedded in postcolonial critiques, patriotic capitalism, or global multiculturalism (177). The trope that posits China as “(m)other” to Hong Kong is

Leo Chia-Li Chu 41 especially problematic in the cultural depictions and construction of border and body politics. Although the current paper cannot adequately address, let alone resolve, these entrenched issues, it does try to contribute to the debate by examining the various modes of representation and imagination of Hong Kong as a body politic in relation to its border, along with the deliberate efforts to create a boundary—as well as those who travel across it—as a reference point to define the identity of Hongkongers.

Epidermal Anxiety: Borders and The Crisis of Masculinity in Intruder (1997)

The plot of Intruder centers on the scheme of Yip (Jacklyn Wu [吳倩蓮]), a Mainland woman who plans to enter Hong Kong by posing as a woman she murdered in Shenzhen. The film details how she kidnaps Chan (Wayne Lai [黎耀 祥]), a middle-aged Hong Kong man, in order to furnish both herself and her husband with new identities. Intruder reaches a climax with a scene depicting Chan’s arms being cut off by Yip’s disabled husband, who subsequently uses them to provide fingerprints for an identity card application. As contemporary critics have noticed, the film may manifest “Hong Kong’s worst paranoia about rapacious Chinese” (Davis and Yeh 12). The conspicuously xenophobic plot notwithstanding, here I intend to approach Intruder via a critical reading of the presentation of identity, boundaries, and the abject horror induced by their violation. My focus will be on how the film presents a certain motif of the “crisis of masculinity” in order to illustrate the emerging new social and political (dis-)order in 1990s Hong Kong. To understand the portrayal of Yip as an intruder, I will argue that the terror she induces originates in her ability to cross the border through murder and identity theft. National and regional borders are not created by physical infrastructure alone. Paperwork such as the production of identity documents as well as their examination may be viewed as an “immune mechanism” buttressed by the police and bureaucracy, while affective reactions may be triggered if such an immune response fails. And yet the contested Hong Kong identity—emerging in the context of, as Ackbar Abbas aptly puts, “love at last sight, a culture of disappearance”—cannot be treated as a given, stable artifact, but must be analyzed in relation to the specific project and ideology any claim of identity implies (777). Intruder therefore manipulates the anxiety surrounding the handover by offering a sensational picture in which not only a breach of border—depicted here as a reified bodily boundary that is nonetheless susceptible to invasion—becomes a source of

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horror, but the very bodies of Hongkongers are vulnerable to mutilation and theft. The cross-border movement that is common in Hong Kong is consequently dramatized. In a series of close-ups of Yip’s border-crossing, audiences, watching but unable to intervene, might find themselves instead subject to the “reverse monitoring” Yip conducts once arriving in the city. Using the business cards she found on the murdered woman, who it is implied was a sex worker, Yip identifies Chan as a suitable target. She then deprives him of his mobility in a planned car accident, and eventually imprisons him in his own house.1 The expected rise in cross-border mobility after the handover is recycled by the film to create a terrifying caricature: as malevolent imposters take advantage of it, ordinary Hong Kong people like Chan appear hopelessly entrapped by a mobility that invites strangers to their houses, who subsequently become masters rather than guests. Significantly, the procedure of applying for an ID card is shown meticulously in the film, which contains real footages of governmental offices, various application forms, and citizens waiting in lines. While the film includes other narrative techniques such as suspense and the cliff-hanger in Chan’s failed escape attempt, the central narrative tension is developed around identity acquisition and evasion of the “immune responses” of a polity. After receiving her new ID card and subduing her captive, Yip, no longer an intruder but an ordinary citizen who easily and naturally passes a police identity check, thus completely inhabits the dead woman’s identity and penetrates Hong Kong society. Both the law and the protective border are now on her side. It is necessary also to examine the portrayal of male characters in order to understand how the crime committed by Yip is connected to gender representation. In the context of Hong Kong, if the crime films of the 1980s suggest a breakdown of traditional Chinese values and Western capitalist modernity, the 1990s is an era in which cinema relocates the implosion of social tension to the bodies of individuals. A middle-aged, divorced, unemployed man like Chan may be viewed as a caricatured embodiment of what Laikwan Pang described as “a sense of entrapment and impotency” prevalent in the social imagination of Hong Kong in the 1990s (331). The uncanny rural mansion Chan inherited from his father is made into an isolated prison, while his wealth becomes the very reason for his imprisonment. The murdered woman’s husband (Yuen Bun [元彬]) is another important male character in this film. Encountering Yip at the border checkpoint, he

1 The Chinese title of the film, Kongbu ji 恐怖雞 (literally “Horrible Chicken”), hints at both Yip’s self-presentation as a “chicken,” i.e., prostitute in slang, as well as issues of gender which I will later discuss.

Leo Chia-Li Chu 43 tries to confront her and expose her true identity. Being the only “able-bodied” male character in the film, he is ironically also the person who makes Yip’s border-crossing possible—since his wife is murdered for nothing but a document, her so-called “One-way Permit,” which allows Mainlanders marrying Hong Kong citizens to acquire residency immediately upon their arrival. Intruder consequently constructs the handover not only as a moment of general identity confusion but a specific crisis in which male Hongkongers, with a border that suddenly becomes dangerously porous, are most vulnerable to the invasion of the “other” coming from the Mainland. While the anxiety about the sudden malfunction of Hong Kong’s border is partially fabricated and reinforced by the popular media, the extent to which Intruder appropriates and exploits the social contexts of the 1990s is still remarkable. As the government started to issue new ID cards with the Special Administration Region logo in the early 1990s, the plot uses this policy to rationalize the success of Yip’s husband, Kwan (Moses Chan [陳豪]), in the scheme to replace Chan in the government registry. The potential for such real-world events to be exploited by hostile outsiders is implied via the many real-world signs and posters included in the film, such as warnings about the danger of hiring “illegal migrants” at the governmental office and ads about “learning to start a new life in Hong Kong” on a footbridge. Notably, despite the crimes Yip committed to infiltrate the city, she is gradually painted not as a cold-blooded murderer but more of an “ordinary” woman who is trying desperately to secure a better future for her husband and herself. Although reading Yip simply as a loyal, traditional Chinese wife would be exaggerating her conformity to patriarchal norms, 2 it is still meaningful to analyze how her character is portrayed amid the various male characters in the film. While the film is full of violence, Yip is not untouched by the violence she perpetrates. For instance, she is evidently disgusted when killing Chan’s dog, and almost experiences a mental breakdown after murdering Chan’s mother when she came to visit him. In a sub-plot that brings Yip and Chan’s young daughter together and allows an attachment between the two to grow, the film further suggests that Yip is not an intrinsically evil person. However, if the female intruder turns out to be more empathetic than she is originally depicted, the film also creates a new villain. The most important outcome of downplaying Yip’s role

2 Collier has argued that Intruder, compared to classical American film noir like Leave Her to Heaven (1945), does not present a significant masculinity crisis because of “the stranglehold patriarchy still has on Asian society” (149). However, Collier’s analysis, in my opinion, runs the risk of neglecting the violated, male, “proper” bodies that the film presents as well as the anxiety it aims to trigger.

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in the murder of Chan is the presentation of Kwan, Yip’s outlaw lover, as the deadliest border-crossing criminal. Having lost both of his arms while escaping the Mainland police, Kwan was the mastermind behind the amateurish Yip’s criminal scheme. Later on, when the man whose wife Yip has murdered rushes into Chan’s house, confidently claiming that he knows kungfu and overpowers Yip, Kwan’s arrival soon brutally seals his fate. Killing the man instantly with a pair of prosthetic iron hooks, Kwan’s body, flesh fused with metal, might be read as an extreme manifestation of the fear of border-crossing criminals, as well as a nightmarish representation of the breach of bodily boundaries. The scene in which Kwan appropriates the dead Chan’s arms evokes abject horror precisely because of the disturbing “mobility” the body parts are endowed with. The intrusion is made into an irreversible “fact” even though the couple’s conspiracy is finally ended by Chan’s daughter, who survives to expose their crime. The horror of Intruder is completed by this very performance of boundary making—the struggle of the Hong Kong “self” to repel the Mainland “other.” The constructed fragility of Hong Kong identity is thus reinforced. What is in crisis, as the film suggests, is now not only masculinity but also the identity of the city as a whole. Nevertheless, while maintaining a binary opposition between the city and the Mainland, Intruder, if read from a critical angle, may be capable of offering unexpected critiques of the power relationships involved in the imagination of a Hong Kong body politic. What has been frequently downplayed is the contradictory fact that the city, especially its capitalists who venture into the Mainland, enjoys, at least in the 1990s, a fairly good economic situation which contributes to an identity that is opposed to the “backward” Mainland. This “chauvinistic self-assertion” about economic achievement is, however, shrouded with self-doubt and anxiety (Law 184). In a sense, by choosing the caricatured Chan, who is estranged from his family but benefits from the “past achievement” in the form of inheritance, to be its main “victim,” Intruder might unintentionally expose the real foundation of the horror it constructs: rather than the threats of malicious outsiders, it is the contradictory and wavering self which makes the imagined boundary into a necessary line of defense. While the economic and political development of the city is certainly tied to regional and national contexts that replicate the insider-outsider dichotomy, it is also important to understand how the reconstruction of such a dichotomy in a film reflects certain assumptions about who the “self” is, and what the “self” fears.

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Border-Crossing and Queer History in Ming Ming (2006)

The first decade of post-handover Hong Kong witnessed both societal changes in the city and a shifting power balance in regional geopolitics and capital accumulation. These emerging contexts are engaged by the two other crime films I analyze in this paper. Their approaches to and assumptions about the issues of borders, mobility, and identity will continue to serve as my focus. While masculinity is not entirely decentered in these films, how they address the struggle against time, space, and bodies is worth investigating. Ming Ming is one of the films that participated in the reconfiguration of meaning and imagination associated with border-crossing in the mid-2000s. The film examines the stories potentially hidden in the personal memories and collective history of Hongkongers, and thereby situates—as well as reproduces—the problem of boundaries in the multiple constructions of gender, sexuality, and desire. The film features D (Daniel Wu [吳彥祖]), an underground fighter haunted by childhood trauma, and D’s lover, the eponymous Ming Ming ( [周迅]), who is chased by a crime boss Brother Cat (Jeff Chang [張信哲]), after stealing a bag of cash and a mysterious box in order to travel with D to Harbin. The film can be characterized by its adoption of a non-linear, multi-perspective narrative and extensive use of heavily edited action sequences, both creating disconcerted perceptions of space and time. First and foremost, the actress who plays Ming Ming, Zhou Xun, has a dual role, also playing Nana, a Hong Kong woman who, while having a crush on D, has little to do with the criminal underworld. As I will demonstrate, Ming Ming can be viewed as a palimpsest on which multiple border-crossings are described, while the travelers’ origins, destinations, and itineraries can be erased, rewritten, or fabricated. The characters’ movements across locations in the film thus becomes a record of multifaceted trajectories: firstly, D’s mysterious disappearance from Hong Kong and reappearance in Shanghai, the inquisitive Ming Ming’s journey to discover the truth hidden in Brother Cat’s box, and the parallel plotline about Nana’s growing affection for Tu ( [楊祐 寧]), a young man forced to flee the city with Nana after volunteering to carry the stolen money for Ming Ming. Later on, it is revealed that the person D has been searching for is none other than his mother who vanished during his childhood. In the meantime, D’s sojourn is juxtaposed against Ming Ming’s own adventure in Shanghai, which is intersected by occasional encounters with Brother Cat’s pawns and their humiliating defeat in CGI-laden scenes. Ming Ming’s calm and confident demeanor is in stark contrast to

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D’s melancholic, if not utterly paranoid, performance. The action choreography of the two characters further highlights the contrast. While Ming Ming fights by casting a handful of bullet-like beads against her enemies, D’s mastery of hand-to-hand combat is transformed into a messy psychological struggle—one of his action scenes is nothing but a hallucination about fighting Shaolin monks who possess magical powers. Even if D can temporarily exorcise his demons by defeating the imaginary monks, he remains trapped throughout the film in a helpless, embodied melancholy. Failing to unravel the mystery of his own origins, D’s anxiety cannot be overcome by physical might alone. The male fighter failing to achieve hegemonic masculinity is then forced to negotiate with his complex, ambiguous, and wounded psyche. Through such deliberate emphasis on D’s fragile identity, Ming Ming initiates its project of interpreting and constructing the concepts of borders, gender, and history. A closer look at the “spatial” elements of Ming Ming helps to decipher how cross-border mobility is contextualized and dramatized in its narrative. The major action is set in the narrow alleys of Sheung Wan, the historic residential and commercial area of Hong Kong, and Shanghai’s old district as well as its newly developed areas. The fragmentation and ambiguity created by the disorienting camera movement are mixed with a pastiche of different architectural styles and contradictory memories. Nana and Tu are consequently portrayed as two Hongkongers stranded in Shanghai against its spectacular, hyper-modern skyline—a conspicuous display of the achievement of two decades of China’s economic reform. At this stage, Ming Ming seemingly dissipates the entrenched “self-other” opposition in the cinematic representation of Hong Kong and the Mainland: both the underworld of Hong Kong and the bewildering space of Shanghai create a sense of alienation and uncertainty. Nevertheless, if such ambivalent mise-en-scène is deemed necessary for the film to complicate the question of identity, this depiction also assumes the primacy of a certain imagination of Hong Kong in the border-crossing drama. As discussed below, the salience of ambiguity and confusion in Ming Ming must not be analyzed as merely a reflection of historical facts; rather, it is also a project which makes a political statement concerning how the past and future of Hong Kong should be defined and imagined. In Ming Ming, the use of language plays an important role in the presentation of the hybridity performed by the characters. Nana and Tu, the “ordinary” Hongkongers, speak only Cantonese. D’s fluent Shanghainese captures his personal connection to the city as well as his rootedness or, arguably, a nostalgia for a sense of rootedness after leaving his home behind. Ming Ming’s Mandarin-only dialogues

Leo Chia-Li Chu 47 do not really make her into a “representative” of Mainlanders but certainly fits a character whose origin remains a mystery. By depicting Ming Ming as a woman with the ability to not be restrained by a place or specific past, the film brings up the issues of language, history, and memory: the proliferation of Mandarin (Putonghua) versus the ongoing decline of other Chinese languages used by different cultural-linguistic groups. Besides, the locales included in its narrative—Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Harbin—all resonate deeply with the constructed culture of colonial-cosmopolitan ambiguity which needs to be “clarified through a critique of space” (Abbas 773). In addition to a labyrinthine urban environment, the film also dramatizes the liminality of movement in cities and connects the transformation of one’s own body to such itineraries. The film then attempts to deal with problems existing both “inside” and “outside” one’s identity by appealing to certain concepts of hybridity and mobility. The xenophobic sentiment of Intruder is subsequently replaced in Ming Ming by another form of self-other relation: a connection between the young, free, adventurous woman and people from an older generation who have secrets to keep in their hearts—or lock in a box. This relation is created by placing Ming Ming’s nonchalant border-crossing experience side by side with the gruesome scars borne by those who dared to transgress the boundaries—be they geographical, gender, or familial—in earlier times. Moreover, the burgeoning relationship between Nana and Tu might be read as an agenda to redefine Hongkongers, in contrast to the bleak picture painted in Intruder, as not the targets of border-crossing criminals but the active youth who are capable of discovering friendship and romance in border-crossing journeys. And finally comes the revelation that Brother Cat is/was D’s mother back in Shanghai. This development, I argue, is the core of Ming Ming’s project in engaging with the long-established trope of depicting China as the “motherland.” Assigned female at birth and enduring not only gender dysphoria but domestic abuse, Brother Cat is portrayed as an embodiment of the complex relation between remembering and forgetting, between the will to survive and the resolution to transform oneself. His representation as the “father figure” governing the underworld, including the underground fight club which D is part of, is in sharp contrast to his previous gender role as a woman and mother. This “plot twist” thus asks the audience to “rewind” the film, to see the transgender character who appears “at first as ‘properly’ gendered, as passing in other worlds, and as properly located within a linear narrative” from a different perspective (Halberstam 78). A queer understanding of the temporal and spatial dimension of border-crossing is

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consequently demanded when the content of the mysterious box—a picture of D and Brother Cat as D’s mother, along with an unsent letter—is revealed, and when Brother Cat’s voiceover narrates the memory of his painful transition, his feelings for D, and the fact that he had long forgotten the past until Ming Ming stole the box. Ultimately, he destroys the memento but chooses to let Ming Ming, unconscious after being poisoned by his subordinates, live to remember the story. The ending of Ming Ming suggests a way to rethink the history of Hong Kong by viewing this image of a fluid border and the performative as well as transformative act of boundary-crossing as part of a positive identity. Such a move can nevertheless induce certain problems by erasing “the excess, the residue, or the ‘Other’ of the identity concerned” in the construction of identity politics (Law 191). On the one hand, the film contributes to the critique of a stable, well-bounded identity by inviting audiences to understand the generational differences among Hongkongers, pointing out the importance of being attentive to the various motivations each person has for coming to Hong Kong, and illustrating the possibility of discovering one’s own situatedness via contrapuntal reading of the stories inscribed in the city; on the other hand, since the film frames the arrival of the “older generation” in Hong Kong as an act of border-crossing occurring in the “past,” it may still risk reproducing a binary opposition between the “Hong Kong-self” and the “Mainland-other” as an opposition between the “younger” and the “older” generation. Even though the youth is encouraged to understand familial memories, the “use” of this knowledge appears so closely related to identity construction that those who embody such memories become marginalized. The last shot of Ming Ming actually epitomizes this tension: while Ming Ming is shown freely roaming and exploring the world, there is no mention of Brother Cat’s fate. Does his journey simply end after giving away his memory? If so, how can he—or should he—participate in the collective imagination of the city? These questions, while not directly addressed in the movie, ought to be asked when analyzing post-handover cinema and its approaches to history and politics.

The City Unbound: Non-Conforming Desire in I Come with the Rain (2009)

If the ending of Intruder hinted that Hongkongers’ bodies and identity remained in danger as the Mainland couple plan their next conspiracy, post-handover cinema responded to such anxiety by creating different narratives about cross-border mobility. Ming Ming is surely not the only film which attempts

Leo Chia-Li Chu 49 to construct an alternative image of border-crossing by alluding to discourses about history and memory. In the following discussion of I Come with the Rain, the historical context I would like to focus on is the “branding policy” of the early 2000s to make Hong Kong into “Asia’s World City.” Aiming to advertise the “top-tier” status of the city and to boost public confidence in the SAR government, the policy was, however, criticized for its lack of “substantial endorsement from the grass roots” and its failure to reverse the anxiety over a perceived dwindling of local uniqueness and competitiveness (Shen 215). Starting with Detective Kline’s () search for Shitao (Takuya Kimura), a billionaire’s missing son, I Come with the Rain soon shifts its focus to the caricature of the socio-political milieu of Hong Kong by introducing elements of crime cinema. Although Klein successfully enlists the help of the local police, including his friend Meng Zi (Shawn Yue [余文樂]), in this mission, the investigation soon descends into chaos when Su (Lee Byung-Hun), a mafia boss, joins the manhunt in order to find his drug-addicted lover, Lili (Trần Nữ Yên Khê), whom he believes was kidnapped by Shitao. Subsequently, the film depicts how ordinary Hongkongers are subject to both intrusive police inquiries and gang violence. It thereby exploits a sense of “alienation and disempowerment” among Hongkongers who feel marginalized in the official economic and political discourses after the handover (Lee 65). Similar to Ming Ming, I Come with the Rain replaces the local-foreign, resident-intruder dichotomy with a sense of ambiguity and fluidity which the city seems to embody. The film nevertheless pushes such a construction even further than Ming Ming did: what it presents is a satirical “Asia’s World City” in which different “Asian” characters—Su performed by Korean actor Lee Byung-Hun, his lover Lili by Vietnamese actress Trần Nữ Yên Khê, Meng Zi, the only “local” character who occasionally speaks Cantonese, by Hong Kong actor Shawn Yue, and Shitao by Japanese actor Takuya Kimura—all communicate in English while struggling against each other. The introduction of this array of morally and ethnically ambiguous characters is thus juxtaposed with the portrayal of Hong Kong as a place plagued by meaningless brutality and intrinsic alienation.3 The theme and style of I Come with the Rain can be spotted in other work by its creator, the Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng. A pioneer in exploring the socio-cultural ramifications of economic reform in , Trần’s previous films

3 While individual actors’ ethnicity and careers can provide critical sub-textual analysis (such as Takuya Kimura’s career as a world-renowned idol and his role as a “savior” in this film), I decided to focus on their representation as generalized “Asian” characters in this film: what is the consequence of presenting Shitao not as a Japanese and Su not as a Korean?

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highlight the (post-)colonial conditions of East Asia through multifaceted metaphors of violence and nostalgia.4 I Come with the Rain applies similar postcolonial methods to criticize the branding policy which envisions Hong Kong as an international financial center: by dramatizing the “dark side” of global mobility, the film puts all its dubious characters in a situation which ironically makes “individual survival instead of capital interests” the one and only goal (Win 143). However, beyond the relatively established discourse of hybridity and ambiguity, the film also attempts to entertain the possibility of a radical reform of identity politics. If Hong Kong is engulfed by transnational mobility, and if the boundary between “self” and “other” is no longer meaningful, a body that can withstand this dramatized form of confusion may therefore symbolize an affect—not the entrapped anxiety of Intruder or the mobile freedom hinted by Ming Ming—that borders on the unnamable jouissance through which the opposition between subject and object can be radically suspended. I Come with the Rain tries to achieve this by reading the homosocial antagonism common in crime films against homosexual desire. At the center of this queering experiment is Shitao. After being shot whilst doing missionary work in the Philippines, he acquires a supernatural power that channels other’s pain to his own body. Intriguingly, both Su and Klein subsequently attempt to understand this enigmatic existence by creating a gendered relation with Shitao. For Su, Shitao becomes a male competitor he must humiliate and destroy; for Klein, however, Shitao is viewed as an object of desire he must dominate. It is later revealed that Klein, in his former career as a police officer in Los Angeles, has developed an ambivalent attachment with Hasford (Elias Koteas), a serial killer who mutilates his victims’ body and combines multiple corpses to create “artworks” which bear a stunning resemblance to Francis Bacon’s grotesque, deformed figures. Klein’s gender identity is evidently unsettled upon realizing Hasford’s plan to turn his “perfect” body into part of his collection. As I will demonstrate below, Klein is then gradually depicted as both an uncompleted object of desire and a subject desiring Shitao’s body.5 It seems that Hasford, before forcing Klein to kill him, has left, by gruesomely biting Klein’s neck, an uncanny “mark” on the desperate detective. With Hasford’s death, the eternally postponed gratification of his desire makes

4 An insightful review of Tran’s previous film Cyclo (1995), along with its “moments of flow and anxious immobility,” has been provided by Christophe Robert (392). 5 As a white American, Klein’s desire for Shitao may also contain a colonial aspect. Travis Kong has offered a critical account on how white men have historically and contemporarily been able to “symbolically represent sophistication and modernity as reflected by their skin color” in the unequal power relation with ‘Asians’ ” (35).

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Klein suicidal. If the “artwork” Hasford creates appears to cast a spell on Klein, it is a dangerous enchantment emerging from the transgression of bodily boundaries among multiple individuals. To indulge oneself in such abject pleasure is to give up the unified identity that modern subjecthood requires. Although Klein’s decision to come to Hong Kong is originally an attempt to leave his trauma behind, the city ends up exacerbating his suffering and confusion. By reinforcing this narrative of the city’s embodied ambiguity, I Come with the Rain intentionally connects the image of a city lacking a border to the threatening but addictive temptation mobility is to Klein. Be it the privilege to move freely across national borders, or the freedom to fulfill one’s desires by moving and being moved by others, mobility is made into a quality of Hong Kong, and such a quality contains the power of jouissance. It is noteworthy that, in one scene, when Klein stares entranced at the photos of Shitao’s body, scarred by his repeated efforts to absorb others’ pain, he suddenly mutters: “Move . . . keep moving” (01:08:29-01:08:44). Although this perverted whimper might be part of a “cat-and-mouse” pursuit he has fantasized about, Shitao’s wounded, volatile body that is impossible to “pin down” but always affected by the pain of others may also be read as a metaphor for the contradictory mobility the film endows Hong Kong with. Those painful complications of mobility are materialized through Shitao’s borderless existence, while the uncertain social, cultural, and political milieu is reflected by his fuzzy gender and ethnic identity.6 The film thereby explicitly questions whether a clear-cut identity is still possible in such conditions, and then answers itself: no, but an ambiguous identity remains an option, if not a solution. Presenting Hong Kong’s history as already entangled with imperialism, colonialism, and contemporary neoliberalism, the film then portrays the capital, people, and desire flowing through the city as potentially symbolizing a disruptive plurality manifested by Shitao’s body. Eventually, Klein, torn between a desire to dominate and be dominated, is depicted as a man on the verge of paranoia. Even Su, who always maintains an ultra-masculine façade, is also shown to slip clumsily in a pool of blood that is produced by his torture of an unfortunate subordinate who has failed to bring Lili back. In the end, Klein only finds a dying Shitao crucified by a mad Su. Known to no one and yet welcoming the pain of all, Shitao’s ambiguous identity becomes

6 While “Shitao” can be a romanized Japanese name, it can also be the transliteration of a Chinese name. Moreover, the fact that Shitao’s father’s family name is “Chen” and that his family grave is located in Hong Kong perhaps indicates a more complex identity of the Chinese-Japanese diaspora.

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messianic, as if a certain salvation can be found through his suffering. Truly, since the idea of identity still retains a singular—as it asks one to be identical to oneself or to the group one identifies with—connotation despite its constructed essence, the quest for identity should also consider the question of affinity (affinitas), which concerns the overlapping borders (finis) through which people can share desire, pain, and hope. The passion of Shitao creates such a motif of affinity by having Shitao submit himself to the violence penetrating the city’s history, while evoking a future that might be built—if more people will share their anxieties as well as anticipation with others—not on a fear of losing one’s identity but on an openness to emergent affections yet to be identified. Nevertheless, I Come with the Rain neglects problems which its ending, as well as the overall plot, may imply. The depiction of Shitao as a messianic figure throughout the film can be viewed as a “counterbalance” to the suffering induced by the trans-local mobility. Hiding in his makeshift hut at the fringe of the city and completely detached from the monetary economy, Shitao’s ascetic, “back-to-the-land” way of life is an extreme antithesis to the landscape of Hong Kong where “physical ground” can become “elusive and irrelevant” due to a planning policy that embraces density and a mixture of residential, transportation, and commercial areas (Frampton, Solomon, and Wong 13). It is as if only by living a “pure” lifestyle can Shitao be distinguished from the people he “saves”—those who are thoroughly consumed by the chaos growing from the “negative” side of global mobility. However, the film never explains why there are so many people awaiting Shitao’s miracle, why they are wounded, or who exactly these people are. Setting this dramatic encounter between the messianic Shitao and a faceless crowd in a city where ambivalence and hybridity are alleged to be the cause of all suffering, I Come with the Rain risks defeating its own political ambition to problematize the self-other opposition. Even if the need for a radical desire based less on identity than on affinity is hinted in the film, there is still a strong message equating Hong Kong as the victimized, fractured, and contradictory “self” that is subject to the mercy of an “other”: in Intruder, this other is the monstrous “outsiders”; in Ming Ming, the “old” generation plays such a role; I Come with the Rain chooses a theological figure as its other. Nonetheless, he who absorbs everyone’s pain while living outside everyone’s life is equally incapable of transforming the city—or the suffering its socio-economic situation causes—as those who have been rendered powerless by it. The construct of such redemptive otherness would be less proactive than reactive since it essentializes an impossible “other” as a necessary component in the struggle of the “self” to confront its own

Leo Chia-Li Chu 53 problem.

Conclusion: Meeting the Shadow of History

After studying the three films, I would like to discuss some potential questions for future researchers of Hong Kong cinema. Firstly, the salience of historical events, especially a major geopolitical event like the handover, may continue to be seen in films which try to incorporate historical contexts into the construction of their narratives. However, as my survey has pointed out, films, when dealing with Hong Kong’s past and future in relation to the concept of border and identity, are prone to emphasize a quality of confusion and ambivalence while utilizing a self-other opposition to approach the “solution”—or lack thereof. Although these films are intriguing in their various ways of dramatizing issues of mobility, constructing borders and border-crossings, and elucidating the role gender plays in the imagination of the body politic, the emphasis on identity and its crisis tends to prioritize a discourse about the positive or negative connotations of Hong Kong’s “fluid” or “hybrid” nature. Indeed, the primacy of such discourse itself does not necessarily entail a lack of critical rigor, but it does ask one to consider alternative discourses these works might have neglected in their quest for identity. Secondly, researchers should investigate how the themes of border, gender, and political imagination may be represented in different genres. There can, and probably should, be more discussion on the possibilities of representing history within a framework other than that of crime or horror. Since films are likely to serve as an “emotionally charged visualization” which generates affective resonance with their audiences (Lee 64), what kinds of affect the characters as well as the narrative will embody definitely matters. Recent crime thrillers—consider Trivisa (樹大招風 Shuda zhaofeng, 2016) which illustrates “the fate of not only the three mobsters but also the former British colony” in the years leading to the handover—may still produce critical insights and revisions of the past (Chu 1098), but untraditional mash-ups such as The Wild, Wild Rose (野玫瑰之戀 Ye meigui zhi lian, 1960) “combining musical, noir and melodrama” demands attention as well (Stokes 14). Can melodrama, another productive genre in Hong Kong cinema, productively engage with the questions of post-handover society? And can different genre hybrids discuss border and gender through narratives focusing on issues other than identity? If the potential of cinematic representation in contemporary Hong Kong is to be further explored, it is crucial for film producers and critics alike to situate the past of the city within a framework which includes a greater diversity of

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emotion, interpretation, and anticipation. Thirdly, the portrayal of different, sometimes contradictory, experiences of the past in the films also raises questions about multiple futures. It is noteworthy that recent films addressing the brewing anxieties, uncertainties, and expectations associated with the post-handover socio-political milieu of Hong Kong, especially in the aftermath of the “Umbrella Movement” of 2014, have been keen on the potential responses such productions cause. If, as Helena Wu argues in her analysis of the complicated and widely debated film Ten Years (十年 Shinian, 2015), both actual as well as “imagined” spectators can be not only agents boosting the circulation of the speculative futures the movie depicts but “the mediators and actors located on different horizons of expectation” (1132), the emotion projected by these works, along with the assumptions about the problems the city currently faces, must be critically examined. This is also why the motif of borders, boundaries, and their transgression should be studied to unveil the affects pertaining to the construction of the “uniqueness” of Hong Kong and of the potential “threats” to its integrity. Crime cinema, in this regard, is not exceptional in its fascination with discourses about the alienating and bewildering effects of the city’s “borderless” nature. Nevertheless, while asking questions about the border of the city, works that dramatize the shadow of history sometimes have trouble in finding a road leading to plural, collective futures. Can history be approached in relation to the present moment? And how can the cinematic representation of history facilitate proactive discussion on current affairs? What researchers should pay attention to may be the presentation of active subjectivity in the cultural production: if the dramatization of identity crisis in the films discussed in this paper still falls short of envisioning alternatives to established political discourses, focusing on the agency Hongkongers do have in (re-)presenting and performing their concerns through narratives not confined to the trope of self-other might be helpful. Last but not least, I would like to highlight the crucial, albeit extremely difficult, question concerning the relation between Hong Kong cinema, problems about borders, and the present moment of acute uneasiness, sometimes even despair, about a fading local identity and the deterioration of the “protective” function of the city’s border—namely, its juridico-political autonomy from Mainland China. While a total expulsion of the intricate connection with the Mainland—be it cultural, familial, or linguistic—from narratives is unlikely to be adopted in films, the anxiety over real or possible dangers of “negative mobility” that would compromise the freedom of Hongkongers is certainly visible. The controversy around the “Extradition Bill” in 2019, along with the ongoing protests and conflicts, might in

Leo Chia-Li Chu 55 the future become a shared historical memory conducive to cinematic critiques of the violence, panic, and struggle Hongkongers have experienced, but in the “here” and “now,” the “raw” and embodied affects, or the incredible odds as well as possibilities people face when trying to make histories, are nevertheless far messier and almost anti-narrative. As a researcher who has the privilege of making a critique at a “safe distance” from the immediate societal experiences, I believe there is a responsibility to view the films studied in the present paper—as well as those yet to be produced—as what Alvin Wong describes as “near-histories,” or the textual speculation and imagination of time, space, and people which conjures up “subterranean and insurgent senses of hope, anger, and even feminist and queer desire” (1105). If the three films analyzed in this paper have approached issues regarding borders, identity, and gender differently, they all capture the crucial narrative that is constantly under transformation and revision in the cinema and society of Hong Kong: the multiple constructions of spatial-temporal imagination based on fascination with mobility, and the problematic but polemical engagement with competing memories and complicated futures. By asking the audience to meet the shadow of history, these fictions do not aim to determine which forms of political action are “better,” or to offer a concrete roadmap to future “salvation”; rather, as an “affective genealogy of the present,” they represent the unsolved problems of the current moment and invite questions that have not yet been conceived (Wong 1109).

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Hong Kong Guidebook. ORO Editions, 2012. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. I Come with the Rain. Directed by Trần Anh Hùng, performances by Josh Hartnett, Elias Koteas, Lee Byung-hun, Takuya Kimura, Shawn Yue 余文樂, and Trần Nữ Yên Khê, TF1 International, 2009. Kong, Travis S. K. “The Seduction of the Golden Boy: The Body Politics of Hong Kong Gay Men.” Body & Society, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 29-48. Kongbu ji 恐 怖 雞 (Intruder). Directed by Kan-cheung Tsang 曾 謹 昌 , performances by Jacklyn Wu 吳倩蓮, Wayne Lai 黎耀祥, Moses Chan 陳豪, and Yuen Bun 元彬, China Star Entertainment, 1997. Law, Wing Sang. Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong UP, 2009. Lee, Vivian P. Y. “Relocalising Hong Kong Cinema.” Writing Hong Kong, edited by Jeffrey Mather and Florian Stadtler, special issue of Wasafiri, vol. 32, no. 3, 2017, pp. 64-70. Ming Ming 明明 (Ming Ming). Directed by Susie Au 區雪兒, performances by Zhou Xun 周迅, Daniel Wu 吳彥祖, Tony Yang 楊祐寧, and Jeff Chang 張 信哲, Polybona Films, 2006. Pang, Laikwan. “Masculinity in Crisis: Films of and Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 325-40. Robert, Christophe. “The Return of the Repressed: Uncanny Spaces of Nostalgia and Loss in Trần Anh Hùng’s Cyclo.” Twenty Years After, edited by Tani Barlow, special issue of Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 20, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 389-415. Shen, Simon. “Re-Branding without Re-Developing: Constraints of Hong Kong’s ‘Asia’s World City’ Brand (1997-2007).” The Pacific Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 2010, pp. 203-24. Stokes, Lisa Odham. “‘A Rose by Any Other Name’: Wong Tin-lam’s The Wild, Wild Rose as Melodrama Musical Noir Hybrid.” Hong Kong Neo-Noir, edited by Esther C. M. Yau and Tony Williams, Edinburgh UP, 2017, pp. 13-29. Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. British Film Institute, 1997. Win, Thong. “Mediating Cultural Transfer: Tran Anh Hung’s Films about Vietnam” Transfers, vol. 3, no. 3, Winter 2013, pp. 141-44. Wong, Alvin K. “Including China? Postcolonial Hong Kong, Sinophone Studies, and the Gendered Geopolitics of China-centrism.” Hong Kong Connections

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across the Sinosphere, edited by Helena Wu and Andrea Riemenschnitter, special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 20, no.8, 2018, pp. 1101-20. Wu, Helena. “The Travelling of Ten Years: Imagined Spectatorships and Readerships of Hong Kong’s Local.” Hong Kong Connections across the Sinosphere, edited by Helena Wu and Andrea Riemenschnitter, special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 20, no.8, 2018, pp. 1121-36.

About the Author Leo Chia-Li Chu is an MA student in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) program at the University of British Columbia. His tentative thesis will discuss the co-development of ecological science and environmental movement in postwar North America. Apart from studies of history and philosophy of science, he is also interested in cultural studies, particularly literary and film criticism.

[Received 3 July 2019; accepted 3 January 2020]