.01 cm apart
I don't understand why this is art," my mom whispers, shuffling away from the museum docent as if he'll arrest her. Before us plays a choppy video of six women in white cloaks twirling in a marsh. To her, it resembles the deleted scenes for another movie.
Every time we pass by something familiar to her life—a kitchen scene, Jesus—my mom nods, as if saying hello. But then we step up to a white canvas bisected by an iridescent line forming two ghostly frames.
"It's about being a mother!" she instinctively blurts. To my surprise, she's right.
After twenty years working in computer science, my mom fell in love with psychology. Then she began writing self-help books in Chinese. Recently, in an effort to make her stories more reader-friendly, she requested I teach her "What is art?" I feel like I might as well tackle a kraken with my bare hands. Now she constantly texts me things like "Why is Mozart famous?"
My mom believes she sacrificed her chance to understand creativity when she was a young girl in 1960s China, faced with choosing between the national school system's art and science tracks. As the eldest daughter in a family of subsistence farmers in a remote village, she knew the security that science offered was like gold.
Despite assuming art wasn't for people from her background, she realized upon immigrating to the United States that it might be for me, the squalling three-year-old on her hip. Our lives had improved. She wanted me to have what she felt she sacrificed: a more refined perspective, one that could easily deconstruct the engines that stoke a culture's powers and pleasures. When I grew older she dragged me through the marbled halls of Dallas museums and made me read Dickens, watch Zhang Yimou films. "What did it mean?" she'd demand after. It took me years to realize she didn't have clear answers herself. Now I'm the one forcing her to analyze paintings of squares. I send her links to experimental Chinese jazz. We read Murakami's Norwegian Wood and FaceTime to discuss study guide themes.
There's one activity we've loved since I was young—watching Chinese movies. The first one I remember was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As an eight-year-old who wasn't allowed to have fun, I was thrilled she'd let me stay up late watching people stab each other. As I got older, she showed me Chinese classics like [End Page 141] The Road Home, pausing every now and then to offer kid-friendly translations. "She discovered he's hiding a maid because his handkerchief smells different," she whispered during Yang Guifei. My memories of these films are all narrated by my mom's voiceover, a David Attenborough–like guide ushering me through the vagaries of human life, death, history, and romance.
My mom's favorites are Jackie Chan comedies. But for her art education, she wants dramas, things that will make her cry. As someone who has always seen art as a rarefied privilege, she has difficulty reconciling that laughter and accessibility belong in that world, too. To her, a film can only be artful if it requires diligence to appreciate its full beauty, and a viewer is artful if they can analyze beyond simple onscreen images. Otherwise she sees movies as mindless leisure.
To kick off her film curriculum, we watch Everything Everywhere All at Once. The alley scene inspired by In the Mood for Love entrances her with its poetry and color. We all tear up at "laundry and taxes" as actors Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan stand drenched in jeweled light, facing each other—and the idea of being different people—with intense longing. "It's referencing Wong Kar Wai," I flex.
"Who's that?"
Scandalized, I hit the pause button. We determine after Googling that she has vaguely heard of him—in Mandarin—but doesn't know why this new Oscar Best Picture would make such a niche reference. I explain that Wong is actually the big Chinese cinephile darling in the West, better known to Anglophone audiences than Zhang Yimou.
A Wong Kar Wai film seems like an ideal companion screening in our curriculum. We would encounter stories rooted in Chinese culture whose artfulness might open doors for both of us, inviting us to come in, take off our shoes, stay awhile.
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My mom visits me and my partner Zé in May, just as my brother Timmy is wrapping up his college finals. The four of us clutter up my kitchen counter, exchanging bowls of dough and minced cabbage, our faces dabbed with flour as we pinch dumpling skins. My mom incorporates Zé's Portuguese upbringing, sprinkling chouriço into a batch we fought over. She boils, fries, and steams. Once every possible dumpling preparation is on the dining table she collapses in a chair with a sigh, just as glad to be off her feet as to dig in. It's another instance of her core philosophy, an immigrant's combination of Chinese labor values and American Puritanism: everything is better if you have to work hard for it.
Afterwards, too full, we huddle together on my velvet couch for Chungking Express. Movie night begins. As Cop 223, Takeshi Kaneshiro slumps into his dimly lit apartment, sprinkles fish food, and chastises the expiry date on his pineapple can. Soft blue light spreads over his scattered belongings, the bulb buzzing quietly [End Page 142] off-screen, as if to echo the constant grating of isolation against the characters' ability to hold on to meaningfulness in their lives.
Alone, I'd be moved by the imagery. At movie night, my mom slaps the couch laughing every time he sighs and leans into walls, solipsistic over pineapple. She asks, "Didn't you say this was a serious film? Where is the art of it? This is a comedy."
If diligence lays the path to true art, Chungking Express bestows the moral glow of a marathon: almost every minute we must pause to dissect or explain something.
Brigitte Lin, all Hitchcockian smolder in that blond wig and sunglasses, shoots her pursuer in the night. Zé grabs the remote: "That tin of fish by his head? Super popular in Portugal." We continue watching with a broadened appreciation of Hong Kong's globalized chaos.
Kaneshiro embarks on his midnight pay phone call spree to every woman he's ever met, even hitting up a fourth-grade classmate. I try to convince Zé that the character isn't totally pathetic: "He's switching between Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese like it's nothing. So he's actually a catch!"
When Kaneshiro cleans off Brigitte's high heels in the hotel shower, my mom complains about the English subtitles: "He sounds way more depressing in Chinese." Turning towards Timmy and Zé, she asks, "Do men really act like this when they're heartbroken?"
When the character looks over at his beagle to lament—"You're man's best friend, yet you can't understand my grief"—all of us reach over to pet my dog. He sits up fast, happy and bewildered. We can't explain the scene to him, but that's not the point. We just want to know from his thumping tail that he's got a peephole into our world.
My mom and I explain to the others how interesting it is that Kaneshiro narrates in Mandarin but speaks in Cantonese. It feels strange to understand him while he ponders his expiry date theory in the grocery store, only to lose the thread and resort to subtitles once he chats to the cashier in Cantonese.
This linguistic bifurcation of his internal and external life severs my connection to him just at the moment he's making a connection with someone else. "Maybe he's happier in Cantonese," Timmy suggests. A potential answer arrives in the middle of a lonely monologue in a smoky, red-tinged bar, when he spots Brigitte nursing her drink. Glare from the lens and beams of warm light split across their faces, highlighting the cold, narrowing space between their bodies as he slides closer to her. As he filters his flirtations through all those languages hoping that she'll connect with something—anything—every now and then his words pierce me, bright with sudden meaning.
Like Kaneshiro's character, I don't want to feel alone in my thoughts. I want to look at my loved ones and know that they understand why I'm laughing, why I'm crying. To discover meaning in Chungking Express, we must reach towards each other, sharing clues from our parts of the world, our couch as globalized as [End Page 143] the people moving past each other onscreen. Ultimately my mom isn't so different from Wong's characters. They're asking for help finding a lesson in expiry dates, searching for signs that everything will fall into place if they're just observant enough.
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Although my mom laughs through the first half of Chungking Express, she rapidly sours in the second half. She throws her hands up in exasperation every time "California Dreamin'" plays, and we're treated to yet another montage of Faye Wong invading Tony Leung's apartment just to scrub his floors. "Why are they making her clean his house for that long?" she complains. "Why can't I understand stuff like this?"
"How about you just let the feeling enter you," I suggest, quoting something I once read about how to appreciate inscrutable poems.
"But what feeling am I supposed to find?" she says, rubbing her eyes. "Cleaning his house alone? It's just too sad."
Despite her belief that all hard work should reap rewards—or a lesson—she draws a firm line because of her own efforts endlessly cooking and cleaning for my dad. There's a difference, she feels, between subjugating yourself for another and digging for insights that will elevate you. By night's end, there's only one lesson from Chungking Express she feels compelled to impress upon me and my brother: "Never clean someone's house just to get them to love you."
How does anyone figure out what art tries to tell you? Although my mom thinks I watch arthouse movies with ease, I've never taken a film class and don't know the language of film criticism. Of course, formal education is not the only way to let art in; this much is clear from how my mom's intuitions keep striking gold. But I can't shake my urge to read others' opinions about films. After we finish a movie, I always run to r/cinephiles Reddit discussions and online reviews to catch what I've missed. Even if I shake my head at my mom's need for an ultimate "moral of the story," I'm still more like her than a person who is simply able to "let the feeling in."
Later that night in r/cinephiles, I find a quote from Quentin Tarantino about Faye Wong, who my family knows as Wáng Fēi: "I don't know anybody who has seen this movie that hasn't got a crush on her." This comment depresses me. I imagine my mom going toe-to-toe with Tarantino about the value of women's labor, the pain of making yourself small in the hopes of love, wielding her hard-won opinions with the ferocity of her favorite wushu heroines. I turn off my phone, concluding that my mom's takeaway about Chungking Express—or at least Wáng Fēi's performance—is the better one. [End Page 144]
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I could answer my mom's questions about Chungking Express by saying reviews praise its hypnotic, smudged qualities. Perhaps one day I'll notice those qualities on a solo viewing. But like all my memories of Chinese movies, my impression of the film's narrative feels chopped and cut, every scene rattled through the tata-ta action of a Jackie Chan flick as we battle over the pause button, forcing the runtime to double.
I'm guessing that our ritual of interruption sounds annoying, but for me our constant need to share context and interpretation is the ultimate gift of watching these movies together. Not a gift of explanation, but the response, that aha, and the sitting back to appreciate something anew, that confirms we're enjoying something in the same way. Every time I think of Chungking Express, what I'll see are the glowing layers of conversation cast over the screen, this luminous nacre of care.
The finer texture of some translations inevitably remains lost. When my mom calls out cultural nuances obfuscated in subtitles, I know she's flattening her life experience into a simple one-liner. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to try to distill this linguistic heritage into digestible fragments. The fingerprints of time and distance smudge even our clearest memories and experiences until they're not so different from streaks of paint on canvas that defy easy interpretation, the inexact art of translating for others so they can really see us. Tapping into an intimacy unbound by context is both a pleasure and a risk, as impossible as it is necessary. When I told another first-generation Chinese American friend I was watching Everything Everywhere All at Once with my mom, she made a pitying laugh and said: "You're gonna come out of that so healed or super-traumatized."
Early on, Everything Everywhere shows us a montage of painful memories between Joy and her mom, Evelyn. At one point, they're both sitting in a car in front of the laundromat. Joy is crying; Evelyn looks furious. There's no dialogue. Although it's as subtly rendered as many moments in Chungking Express, my mom instantly catches what's going on. Timmy and I are both queer, and although she's very supportive now, both of our coming-outs (also in cars) ended in tears. I can't tell if the feeling that overcomes her is recognition of our faces in Joy's, or her own face in Evelyn's. Maybe it's the space between them, suffused with mutual grief and disappointment. Or, maybe it's the stomach-dropping sensation of what art promises: the great leap—the translation—made without study guides. Just entering the feeling that already exists inside of her.
My mom's eyes well up and she reaches for both our hands, squeezing them tightly in her lap. She says she's sorry. She explains she didn't get what it meant to us back then to work up the courage to tell the truth about ourselves, despite the risk. Then we're weeping together. The light from the screen smudges our faces with the color of old pain. The space between us closes and closes. [End Page 145]
Zen Ren is a queer first-generation Chinese-American writer in Austin, Texas. Their stories, essays, and poems are published in Electric Literature, swamp pink, Nimrod, Boulevard, Curbed, and others. They were a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and won Nimrod's New Writer Fiction Award. They are currently working on their first novel, speculative literary fiction about two android best friends and rivals. When not writing they're knitting, sewing, or skateboarding. Say hi at zenrenwrites.com!
