In the Mood for Love

In the Mood for Love Alexis Cheung (bio) Why should I remarry?" Popo asks me. It's 2011 and she is eighty now, her hair silvered and her hands crooked, a widow for nearly forty-four years. Her response isn't an insight but a rebuttal to my original question: "Why did you never remarry?" It's a question I should have asked sooner, if I could have, had I ever learned Cantonese. "I don't know," I laugh. "Didn't you meet a guy or something?" I say this to Alison, the translator whom my father has hired to help me. I'm five thousand miles away, no longer at home in Hawai'i, in New York City—a freshman at NYU, speaking with my Popo by phone for my English oral history project. When I was given the assignment, I knew I would record Popo, because it was easier to hide my personal curiosity behind academic scholarship, which would lessen any discomforting intimacy. "Even though he passed away, I still had my husband—and he was a very good husband," Alison tells me, her voice hurried. I imagine Popo and Alison sitting on the brown corduroy couch, how [End Page 422] their weight would leave faint outlines in its brown fabric. I can see Popo's apartment, unchanged since my youth, with its white brick walls and the recessed closet on the left near her narrow kitchen. Its closet doors are pulled open to reveal inner walls covered with tinfoil and shelves lined with seven statues of varying sizes, colorful ceramic and intricate wooden Buddha and Kwan Yins, the Goddess of Compassion, as a makeshift Buddhist shrine. A small dish holds burning incense whose scented smoke spirals in the air and leaves ash in powdery clumps. By the stairs, which lead up to her and my Aunty Amy's rooms, newspaper clippings of images—a diamond bracelet, Labrador puppies, a Christmas tree—are taped against the wall, and reach from the floor to the ceiling. As the former subject of a British colony, Popo has pasted the Royal Family in her collage, and Queen Elizabeth II smiles and waves down at us. "We met when we were very humble, not a lot of money," Alison continues. "We went through a lot, so I did not consider getting married again to another person." Then Popo shares what might be the closest thing to dating advice I've ever heard: "Your Gunggung had a short life, but he was a very good man. It's not guaranteed that you will marry a good person, and so I'm lucky." I'm too young to learn from the wisdom in Popo's words, to equate goodness with good fortune, but I feel buoyed by this knowledge: that she loved him, that he was good to her, that though their time together was brief, it would still last her entire lifetime. _______ It's 2019, and I am twenty-seven years old when I first watch In the Mood for Love. The film, written and directed by Wong Kar Wai, has long been adored since it premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. My best friend, a formally trained actor and cultivated [End Page 423] cinephile, tells me it's one of her favorite films. "It's based in Hong Kong," she says, knowing my own family origins. I ignore her recommendation for months, until I am bored one evening at home, and finally decide to watch it. Immediately after viewing it on my laptop, I join the movie's legion of admirers, though for reasons beyond its cinematic appeal. The story follows Chow Mo-wan, a journalist, and a secretary named Su Li-zhen, whose spouses are having an affair. Played by Hong Kong movie stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, the jilted pair are beautiful and glamorous. Tony's planar cheekbones cast persistent shadows down his face. Maggie's soft, doll-like features contrast with her sharp, high-collared qipao. Because it's impossible to see beyond their stardom to their characters, they remain Tony and Maggie to me. They're the only Chinese people who...

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