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Wong Kar-wai (director), Chungking Express (4K Restored Edition), 2021 (1994). 103 min.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the original release of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, the South Korean multiplex cinema chain Megabox recently screened the restored 4K version between February and March 2024. This restoration, produced in collaboration with Criterion in 2021, prompted reflection on my personal experience as an ex-Hong Kong expat revisiting the movie in Seoul today, at a significant distance both spatially and temporally from the movie’s setting in Hong Kong in 1994.  

The film comprises two parts: the first episode follows Ho Chi Moo, aka “223” (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a heartbroken cop who crosses paths with a mysterious woman in a blond wig (Brigitte Lin) seeking revenge for her botched drug smuggling operation. The second episode centres on Faye, an employee at the Midnight Express snack bar, who develops feelings for “663” (Tony Leung), another police officer who frequents the snack bar, drinking black coffee while waiting for his flight attendant lover to return.

The restored 2021 version has invited much attention, if not debate, for its distinctive teal tone (a preference often seen in Criterion releases) and heightened contrast in light and shadow. These alterations accentuated the colours of Hong Kong’s iconic neon signs while intensifying the distinctions between night and day scenes. Our attachment to these colour treatments might suggest a desire to remember Hong Kong as we wish it to be, rather than how it truly existed in physical reality: with brightly lit neon signs, street noodle stalls basking in sunlight, and friendly charming police officers. Was Hong Kong ever truly like that, or have I been daydreaming all this time? Memories are already elusive. Fracturing that which is inherently ephemeral makes it even more challenging to hold onto those memories, especially in light of unforeseen sociopolitical changes that fundamentally altered everyday life in Hong Kong. The city I had once hoped to call home, where I lived for five tumultuous years between 2017 and 2022, now exists in my memory as a clichéd transient place for yet another wide-eyed expat sojourner who never quite found her footing. In a sense, Chungking Express has evolved into a mnemonic device for my memories of Hong Kong, an ode to my unrequited love for the city from which I reluctantly departed, much like the characters who continuously oscillate between forgetting, remembering, leaving, returning, and attempting to fulfil broken promises.

Having lived in Hong Kong, one’s perspective on the movie’s many moments inevitably shifts: themes of anxiety surrounding a future, the struggle to remember and hold onto what is rapidly disappearing, the uncertainty of ever being able to return, and the perpetual yearning for somewhere else, yet being unable to truly depart. “If my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years,” murmurs 223. On his 25th birthday, a “historic moment”, he runs to forget, trying to wring out “all of the moisture out of his body” lest he cry again over the loss of a part of his life.

A sense of deferral, signs of cancellation, and the dreaded anticipation of consequences loom large, as seen in 663’s “boarding pass” to his ex-girlfriend’s heart being revoked, delaying his reading of the letter she left behind. Yet there is also hope, with Faye’s earnest efforts to transform 663’s apartment into a refuge for recovery and growth. From swapping out stuffed toys to hiding flip-flops and introducing new goldfish to the tank, these changes are subtle and gradual rather than abrupt and disruptive, unfolding over time.

More than a tale of love and lonely, restless souls, these allegories have rendered the movie as a haunting artefact documenting individuals striving to find their footing in this ever-fluctuating city, its teeming crowds passing through a forest of buildings, and more importantly, undergoing larger, irreversible historical changes. By capturing what is put into motion toward impending historical shifts, Chungking Express has remaineda powerful motion picture over the past 30 years.

If film works like Chungking Express demonstrate the genre’s capacity to move the audience by evoking their kinaesthetic memories—not only of past experiences watching the film in a specific spatio-temporal context, but also of having inhabited the movie’s fictive environment in material reality—then the experience of watching Chungking Express in Seoul in 2024 encapsulates precisely that. However, aside from experiencing goosebumps upon hearing the unmistakable tremolo of the guitar at the beginning of Faye Wong’s “Dream Lover” (夢中人), itself a cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams”—much like the sensation I felt when first watching the film in 1997—I come to the realisation that the Hong Kong in Chungking Express, to which I have my embodied responses, no longer exists in reality.

Yet, if there is one final take away from the movie, it’s the understanding that one will always return eventually, despite the heartbreak. Whether the physical place of return is the city you once loved and remembered is beside the point; it may be a Hong Kong, one of many versions you wish to remember, and that is what makes your unrequited love worthwhile. Echoing 663’s closing lines, “It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s where you want to be.”

How to cite: Yoon, Soo Ryon. “An Ode to Unrequited Love, 30 Years Later: Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/29/chungking-express-restored/.

Soo Ryon Yoon is a National Research Foundation academic research professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. She has published her research on racial politics of contemporary Korean performance in a number of venues including positions: asia critique, Performance Research, GPS: Global Performance Studies, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She was previously an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University and a CEAS postdoctoral associate at Yale University. She was deeply immersed in Hong Kong popular culture as a teenager by way of Wong Kar-wai’s films.

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