Tag: Josephine Koo Mei-Wah

Full Moon in New York (人在紐約, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1989)

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“We’re all Chinese, why argue?” asks one exasperated woman in Stanley Kwan’s tale of displacement and reunification, Full Moon in New York (人在紐約). While the three heroines hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China respectively may stand in for a pan-Chinese identity along with an attempt to preserve cultural identity in a third place, they also discover a sense of solidarity in being young women cast adrift in a sometimes hostile city and changing times.

As if to ram home the themes of reunion, the film opens with a wedding but one filled with awkwardness and contradictions. Chinese-American businessman Thomas makes a few off-colour jokes about his new bride, a woman he met while travelling to Shanghai, to the effect that it’s very funny he’s married a woman from the Mainland while praising the pastry chef who made their wedding cake for bothering to make the bride and groom like Chinese people. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) is confused and doesn’t get his jokes while struggling with the foreignness of an American-style wedding, uncertain as to how to cut the cake while Taiwanese guest Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) quips that she will teach her how to cut up men.

Hsiung-ping is an actress in the middle of a breakup with an obnoxious American boyfriend who has defaulted on the rent for their apartment which is owned by no-nonsense Hong Konger Jiau (Maggie Cheung). Jiau has fallen headlong into the capitalistic abyss of the 1980s in which she chases business success at all costs and is determined to make serious money. “I like taking risks,” she tells the boring the businessman she’s set up with while, despite having been in relationships only with women, apparently falling for his business savvy friend. She’s intermittently stalked by Stella, seemingly an ex that she struggles to move on from.

Though originally at odds with each other, the three women develop a sense of friendship and solidarity not least by being outsiders finding solace in their culture. After getting drunk at Jiau’s father’s Chinese restaurant, Hsiung-ping abruptly breaks into a rendition of a Taiwanese song, while Zhao Hong joins her with a folksong from northern China. Jiau looks on with confusion. She cannot think of what to sing as a woman from Hong Kong, signalling her difficulty in expressing her national identity, before settling on a Sally Yeh Cantopop track. She seems to be one of many choosing to seek their futures overseas with the Handover looming and the shadow of Tiananmen Square in the background. 

Hsiung-Ping, meanwhile, represents a second wave of migration as her father was a nationalist solider who went to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war. With the White Terror now over, men like him aren’t so welcome anymore, though as Hsiung-Ping points out who exactly has he been representing for all these years in America? “Once can save one’s country from abroad,” he answers as if singing the song of an exile and echoing each of the women’s attempts to preserve their culture, though what she comes to discover about him through his relationship with a Mainland Chinese woman who suffered in the Cultural Revolution disturbs her sense of righteousness and legacy.

The legacy of the Cultural Revolution is also what Zhao Hong is trying to escape, but finds herself frustrated by life in America while Thomas constantly brushes off her desire to bring her mother to live with them in New York. Thomas’ family are almost entirely Westernised while he seems to almost fetishise Zhao Hong’s Chineseness with quips about his Mainland wife. She tries to ask him about her mother and he changes the subject by remarking that what drew her to him was her black hair. When they visit his family for dinner, Thomas’ mother cooks a pot roast while his father asks him to dispose of an ancestral tablet that he can’t bring himself to throw away. To Thomas it’s just an antique that he jokes is probably worth something to the right kind of collector and would look “cool” in their apartment. Thomas’ Cantonese-speaking father asks if it’s true that ancestral tablets were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution and smashed, making this one yet another example of culture surviving in another place, but seems to be uninterested in the answer when Zhao Hong sadly recalls her mother carving her late father’s name into the back of a chair in defiance of the regulations.

Zhao Hong’s fatherlessness is also a reflection of her sense of dislocation. As she points out, both Jiau and Hsiung-ping have their fathers with them in New York while she has no one other than Thomas. She looks on in consternation as he chats with a white male employee about arranging visits to Chinatown as a collection of mainly elderly Chinese women get on with the actual work of sorting fabric behind them. He finally tells her she should learn to be more American and likens missing her mother to a mental illness, explaining that American people don’t want to live with their parents all their lives, entirely missing the point that the issue is not cultural notions of filial piety that he has now, to some extent, abandoned, but that the close bond between Zhao Hong and her mother forged during the Cultural Revolution has been disrupted by this migration and must now be resolved through reunion. 

Nevertheless, Jiau swears that one can only prosper here by embracing the qi of New York, on the one hand opening all her windows at night as advised by her feng shui practitioner, while, on the other hand, her Hong Konger father runs a Hunnan-style restaurant that serves Peking Duck to cater to American tastes and expectations with the staff and treasured guests eating the heads in the back. Hsiung-Ping is rudely asked by a white male theatre director why a Chinese woman thinks she can play Lady Macbeth, and Jiau loses her temper when a man deliberately bumps into her in the street chasing after him and then hitting him with her shoe. In various ways, this new environment can be hostile towards them, asking them to discard the culture they have come to save or otherwise to bastardise it, but nevertheless the three women discover a sense of community and solidarity even amid their own conflicts and contradictions.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Till We Meet Again (生前约死后, Steven Ma, 2019)

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“What if you let go of my hand and I get lost?” an over anxious little boy asks his mother. “Then you should stay where you are,” she tells him, “Mum will definitely come back for you.” It’s an instruction the now adult Wai (Steven Ma Chun-Wai) has perhaps taken too literally, struggling under the weight of grief and filial guilt while standing still waiting for his mother to find him again in the hope of earning her forgiveness for a sin he does not quite want to remember. Semi-autobiographical, Steven Ma’s Till We Meet (生前约死后) again is at once a dark psychodrama of man undone by loss but also a deeply touching evocation of an unbreakable mother son bond. 

Now a solitary salesman, 30-something Wai has only one wish – to reunite with his mother whom he hasn’t seen in over 10 years fearing that she bears some kind of grudge against him. We in fact see Mui (Josephine Koo Mei-Wah), his mother, angrily telling another woman, Lai (Bee Wong Chiu-Yam), that she refuses to see her son though the scene is not quite as it first seems. After abruptly quitting his job, Wai wanders out into the street and endures some kind of mental breakdown after which he visits his psychiatrist who reminds him that his mother is dead and has been for some time. 

Wai avows that he doesn’t like taking his medication because it makes him feel “sluggish” but increasingly finds his mental universe fracturing, shifting between sepia-tinted memories of his early childhood during which his mother first became ill and his life as a young man during which she suffered a relapse and later passed away. We begin to doubt Wai’s perception, uncertain if people and events he encounters are “real” or a product of his psychosis. His mother, ghost or merely spectre of memory, hovers on the sidelines apparently unwilling to see him though perhaps for his own good in hoping he will finally be able to move on and learn to be happy in acceptance of his loss. 

Tracey (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying), his perhaps unrealistically invested psychiatrist, reminds Wai that he isn’t the only person who’s ever been bereaved or felt abandoned, left behind by those who have gone far away. She herself lost her mother young and was then abandoned by her father who left her in the care of an uncle who too abandoned her and ran off with all her father’s money. Another ghostly, perhaps imagined, conversation with Mui reveals that again Tracey may not have the full story and may never get it but unlike Wai may still have the chance to achieve a kind of closure with the traumatic past. He meanwhile carries the burden of his repressed guilt as it slowly works its way to the surface, cutting through his fragile psyche like a knife. 

While Mui’s conversations with third parties presumably taking place entirely within Wai’s mind may hint at a deeper psychological crisis they are essentially attempts to work out his guilt and shame, one-sided dialogues that eventually guide him back towards an acceptance of the truth he was intent on forgetting beginning with the traumatic fact of his mother’s death. Perhaps to some Wai’s maternal attachment may seem extreme, as the psychiatrist echoes in reminding him he’s not the only son to suffer such catastrophic loss, but it’s underpinned by a sense of filial guilt that lies at the heart of their bond in his worry that his own distress pushed Mui into pursuing a path she may otherwise have rejected on the grounds it would only cause her more pain for an additional few weeks of life. 

Trapped in his grief and guilt, Wai staggers through a nightmarish existence elegantly manifested in Ma’s abrupt tonal shifts as Wai finds himself staggering along a darkened corridor complete with faulty lighting and a single exit, while the sky itself seems to brighten to more romantic tones as he embraces a fantasy of a happier time drawing closer either to a kind of closure or the victory of his delusion whichever way you wish to read it. A painful journey through guilt and grieving, Ma’s unsparing drama provides few easy answers for living with loss but does perhaps allow its hero a degree of escape if only in unreality. 

Till We Meet Again streams in the UK until 15th February as part of Focus Hong Kong

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)