Lust, Exhaustion
I am in Shanghai this past Monday evening, riding a taxi to my pal Shanghai Vixen's fabulous French concession flat, when suddenly Tang Wei's bottom and Tony Leung's most private parts appear, for a split second, within inches of my nose.
Did somebody inject a hallucinogen into my siu lung bao? No, I'm not having a erotic hallucination, or a deja vu of my recent viewing of Lust, Caution. Capitalism is the culprit. (In Shanghai, every morning at six am, the minarets blast out Deng's call to prayer: "It is better to get rich than sleep!") Anyway, nowadays in Shanghai, there's no escape from commercialism's tentacles. Most taxis come equipped with those annoying seat-back video screens: as the flag on the meter drops, the ads begin rolling inches from your eyeballs. Push the button for "sound off" and it just gets louder.
The Shanghai taxi-seat ad trailer for Lust, Caution is a montage of the hottest 20 seconds culled from the 12 minutes of bedroom scenes that will almost certainly be cut when the Chinese censors finish editing Ang Lee's film for mainland release. But in Shanghai, the heavy hand of censorship is a breeze for any film aficionado to circumvent. All you have to do is flag a cab.
What a difference from my Hong Kong Lust, Caution experience! Here, the film is rated "Category III", meaning anyone who is over 18 is allowed to buy a ticket and see the unexpurgated original version in the comfort and privacy and freedom of their local theater. That's in theory--in practice, the act of going to see this film made me feel as naughty as a bad Catholic school girl being hauled off to the nuns for a skirt-length check. First, at the top of the escalator to the IFC Palace Cinema, the ticket collector made a point of warning me "Must turn off mobile" as he ripped my stub in half. Then, outside the door to the screening room, where two guards were stationed, I had to submit to a search of my bag.
I sat down in the very cushy IFC seat and tried to relax. But when the lights went down, two additional security guys with flashlights began to patrol up and down the aisles. Were they searching for hidden video cameras, perverts, or both? The guards stood sentinel at the front and back of the theatre for most of the first hour of the film. And just as Tony ripped off Tang Wei's cheong sam, they ripped into action again, vigilantly roaming the aisles, flashlights swinging.
You could shrug it off, as some of my Hong Kong friends did, and say that this surveillance was all about catching pirates. Still, I've been to lots and lots of movies in Hong Kong, many of them Category III, and I've never experienced this kind of hyper-patrolling. It made me feel uneasy, adolescent, and as the film unfolded I couldn't stop feeling self conscious. Were the guards watching for my reactions? I carefully repressed any, and composed a poker face which I held throughout the show. After I walked out of the theater, it occured to me that the Hong Kong Flashlight Patrol, quite unintentionally, added an aesthetic dimension to the film that I would never have experienced if I'd seen it in New York. Watching Lust, Caution in Hong Kong, I was made to feel as stifled, encumbered and repressed as any character in Eileen Chang's short stories. I'm sure Eileen would have approved.
Speaking of Cheung Ngoi Ling...
I went to Shanghai on business and didn't have much free time. And I don't usually do sightseeing things like make pilgrimages to the houses of famous authors. Someone had given me a copy of a book with pictures of notable sights in Shanghai, and one of them was Eileen Chang's old apartment. The old art deco style building stayed in my mind, and as I was on my way to the Jingan Temple, crossing Changde Road, I spotted a building that looked just like it. So I got closer, and sure enough, over the dreary, neglected entryway:
...the local community board had placed a commemorative plaque in 2005. Chang lived here in the late 1930's and early 40s, while she wrote "The Golden Cangue" and her most famous short stories:
But we were talking about sex, weren't we? I actually thought the sex in Lust, Caution was more tragic and upsetting than it was erotic. It wasn't tittilating or a turn on, and it didn't warrant a surveillance blitz. But that's Hong Kong for you. Sex in the city is...well, I don't think I have ever been in a metropolis with less frisson. And I've been in a lot of cities that are pretty low on the heat scale--London, Singapore, Boston. In Hong Kong, there is no public flirting. Zero. You can walk the streets all day and night, and not catch a single eye, feel an instant of zing. (When I go back to New York, it takes me weeks to readjust to the alternative universe of open sexual vibes). And when the police force ditched those beautifully cut pea-green colonial-era uniforms that made every officer, even the geekiest guy, look like Andy Lau, Hong Kong lost its last little drop of public va va voom.
There is an upside, a big one, to Hong Kong's negative frisson--it is a remarkably safe and gentle place to be a single woman. I've never been harassed on the street here, and I think nothing of walking around alone at 3am. Nowhere else in the world can I feel as free on the streets as a man. But there's a downside, too. Living here can feel monkish at times--there's lots of life's energy in the air, but there's something missing in the mix, something that you can't quite put your finger on. I've lost several good friends to Hong Kong's dry asexuality. As my friend Sunny (gay, Asian) said, as he fled to Madrid after 10 years in Asia's World City. "I want to be in a place where there's a chance I might actually have sex."
Of course he exaggerates. Indeed, I have it on very, very good authority that sex occasionally does occur in Hong Kong. (I was surprised to find out that several of my 50-something pals here are the children of concubines, second or third wives.) But, like the passion in Eileen Chang's short stories, sex in Hong Kong is nuanced, hidden, repressed. When I first started coming to Hong Kong seven years ago, I thought this was a Chinese thing--Confucian modesty, shyness and all those other cliches. But then I went to Beijing, to Shanghai, and the frisson on the streets hit me like a truck. Sorry, Confucius, the boys of Shanghai have really strayed from the path. Eyes connect and hold the gaze a little longer than necessary. Heads turn. Eyebrows raise. It's almost like being back home in New York. Indeed, it may be better.
"Shanghai men are like Shanghai food--sweet and oily," chuckles Ms. Vixen as we sip gin martinis in her salon. In my honor, Ms. V has invited her Hong Kong born and bred pal Karen over for drinks. Still a bit shocked from my passionate encounter with Tony Leung in the Shanghai taxi, our conversation naturally turns to a discussion of the Lust versus Caution ratio of the men in our respective cities. Do Shanghai men make the first move or wait for you to take action? (Answer: they move. But you should assume they have a wife or girlfriend--or both!--already in the picture)
And this question, to Karen siu je: Should I take it personally when a Hong Kong guy arrives at my apartment after midnight, immediately turns on the Chelsea vs. Bolton football match, then falls dead asleep on the couch at half-time?
Karen rolls her eyes at my naivete. "That is typical behavior for a Hong Kong man."
And...I try to phrase this delicately..what about the Hong Kong guy's, um, lack of interest.
"Again, this is all very typical. How many hours does a Hong Kong guy work? Ten, eleven, twelve hours a day? There is nothing unusual about his behavior. He is exhausted. You are lucky that he is snoring on your couch."
And there you have it. Unbridled capitalism (plus a dollop of income inequality, cronyism, and an overheated work ethic) has succeeded in creating an overworked society in which the restrained, repressed relations between the sexes surpass even Confucius' wildest dreams. I have a suggestion for Ang Lee: come to Hong Kong to film your sequel. Lust, Exhaustion.
Did somebody inject a hallucinogen into my siu lung bao? No, I'm not having a erotic hallucination, or a deja vu of my recent viewing of Lust, Caution. Capitalism is the culprit. (In Shanghai, every morning at six am, the minarets blast out Deng's call to prayer: "It is better to get rich than sleep!") Anyway, nowadays in Shanghai, there's no escape from commercialism's tentacles. Most taxis come equipped with those annoying seat-back video screens: as the flag on the meter drops, the ads begin rolling inches from your eyeballs. Push the button for "sound off" and it just gets louder.
The Shanghai taxi-seat ad trailer for Lust, Caution is a montage of the hottest 20 seconds culled from the 12 minutes of bedroom scenes that will almost certainly be cut when the Chinese censors finish editing Ang Lee's film for mainland release. But in Shanghai, the heavy hand of censorship is a breeze for any film aficionado to circumvent. All you have to do is flag a cab.
What a difference from my Hong Kong Lust, Caution experience! Here, the film is rated "Category III", meaning anyone who is over 18 is allowed to buy a ticket and see the unexpurgated original version in the comfort and privacy and freedom of their local theater. That's in theory--in practice, the act of going to see this film made me feel as naughty as a bad Catholic school girl being hauled off to the nuns for a skirt-length check. First, at the top of the escalator to the IFC Palace Cinema, the ticket collector made a point of warning me "Must turn off mobile" as he ripped my stub in half. Then, outside the door to the screening room, where two guards were stationed, I had to submit to a search of my bag.
I sat down in the very cushy IFC seat and tried to relax. But when the lights went down, two additional security guys with flashlights began to patrol up and down the aisles. Were they searching for hidden video cameras, perverts, or both? The guards stood sentinel at the front and back of the theatre for most of the first hour of the film. And just as Tony ripped off Tang Wei's cheong sam, they ripped into action again, vigilantly roaming the aisles, flashlights swinging.
You could shrug it off, as some of my Hong Kong friends did, and say that this surveillance was all about catching pirates. Still, I've been to lots and lots of movies in Hong Kong, many of them Category III, and I've never experienced this kind of hyper-patrolling. It made me feel uneasy, adolescent, and as the film unfolded I couldn't stop feeling self conscious. Were the guards watching for my reactions? I carefully repressed any, and composed a poker face which I held throughout the show. After I walked out of the theater, it occured to me that the Hong Kong Flashlight Patrol, quite unintentionally, added an aesthetic dimension to the film that I would never have experienced if I'd seen it in New York. Watching Lust, Caution in Hong Kong, I was made to feel as stifled, encumbered and repressed as any character in Eileen Chang's short stories. I'm sure Eileen would have approved.
Speaking of Cheung Ngoi Ling...
I went to Shanghai on business and didn't have much free time. And I don't usually do sightseeing things like make pilgrimages to the houses of famous authors. Someone had given me a copy of a book with pictures of notable sights in Shanghai, and one of them was Eileen Chang's old apartment. The old art deco style building stayed in my mind, and as I was on my way to the Jingan Temple, crossing Changde Road, I spotted a building that looked just like it. So I got closer, and sure enough, over the dreary, neglected entryway:
...the local community board had placed a commemorative plaque in 2005. Chang lived here in the late 1930's and early 40s, while she wrote "The Golden Cangue" and her most famous short stories:
But we were talking about sex, weren't we? I actually thought the sex in Lust, Caution was more tragic and upsetting than it was erotic. It wasn't tittilating or a turn on, and it didn't warrant a surveillance blitz. But that's Hong Kong for you. Sex in the city is...well, I don't think I have ever been in a metropolis with less frisson. And I've been in a lot of cities that are pretty low on the heat scale--London, Singapore, Boston. In Hong Kong, there is no public flirting. Zero. You can walk the streets all day and night, and not catch a single eye, feel an instant of zing. (When I go back to New York, it takes me weeks to readjust to the alternative universe of open sexual vibes). And when the police force ditched those beautifully cut pea-green colonial-era uniforms that made every officer, even the geekiest guy, look like Andy Lau, Hong Kong lost its last little drop of public va va voom.
There is an upside, a big one, to Hong Kong's negative frisson--it is a remarkably safe and gentle place to be a single woman. I've never been harassed on the street here, and I think nothing of walking around alone at 3am. Nowhere else in the world can I feel as free on the streets as a man. But there's a downside, too. Living here can feel monkish at times--there's lots of life's energy in the air, but there's something missing in the mix, something that you can't quite put your finger on. I've lost several good friends to Hong Kong's dry asexuality. As my friend Sunny (gay, Asian) said, as he fled to Madrid after 10 years in Asia's World City. "I want to be in a place where there's a chance I might actually have sex."
Of course he exaggerates. Indeed, I have it on very, very good authority that sex occasionally does occur in Hong Kong. (I was surprised to find out that several of my 50-something pals here are the children of concubines, second or third wives.) But, like the passion in Eileen Chang's short stories, sex in Hong Kong is nuanced, hidden, repressed. When I first started coming to Hong Kong seven years ago, I thought this was a Chinese thing--Confucian modesty, shyness and all those other cliches. But then I went to Beijing, to Shanghai, and the frisson on the streets hit me like a truck. Sorry, Confucius, the boys of Shanghai have really strayed from the path. Eyes connect and hold the gaze a little longer than necessary. Heads turn. Eyebrows raise. It's almost like being back home in New York. Indeed, it may be better.
"Shanghai men are like Shanghai food--sweet and oily," chuckles Ms. Vixen as we sip gin martinis in her salon. In my honor, Ms. V has invited her Hong Kong born and bred pal Karen over for drinks. Still a bit shocked from my passionate encounter with Tony Leung in the Shanghai taxi, our conversation naturally turns to a discussion of the Lust versus Caution ratio of the men in our respective cities. Do Shanghai men make the first move or wait for you to take action? (Answer: they move. But you should assume they have a wife or girlfriend--or both!--already in the picture)
And this question, to Karen siu je: Should I take it personally when a Hong Kong guy arrives at my apartment after midnight, immediately turns on the Chelsea vs. Bolton football match, then falls dead asleep on the couch at half-time?
Karen rolls her eyes at my naivete. "That is typical behavior for a Hong Kong man."
And...I try to phrase this delicately..what about the Hong Kong guy's, um, lack of interest.
"Again, this is all very typical. How many hours does a Hong Kong guy work? Ten, eleven, twelve hours a day? There is nothing unusual about his behavior. He is exhausted. You are lucky that he is snoring on your couch."
And there you have it. Unbridled capitalism (plus a dollop of income inequality, cronyism, and an overheated work ethic) has succeeded in creating an overworked society in which the restrained, repressed relations between the sexes surpass even Confucius' wildest dreams. I have a suggestion for Ang Lee: come to Hong Kong to film your sequel. Lust, Exhaustion.
I think the sequel could also be Lust, Power - if you remember Mr. Lei Baat Fong's article in the Apple Daily on Sept 12.
http://tinyurl.com/yppbyz
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thank you for another insightful and very interesting entry! i've been reading all your entries since i stumbled across your blog on google but this is my first time commenting *waves hi* (i was randomly googling stuff during lunch break, and somehow landed here after my search of "my experience with hong kong" in my interest of how 'foreigners' see my hometown).
my family immigrated to US (LA) in 1996. most of my Hongkonger friends come from similar background (moving here around 1996-97), just recently we've been talking about the 'ah sook' in HK (mid-aged men), how they'd stare at girls who wear tank tops and even attempt to touch the bottoms of girls wearing mini skirts in elevators. the girls were commenting on the 'influx' of such haam-sup men. And they also said that in US it's normal for girls to wear tank tops, mini skirt and flip flop during summer, but if they go back to HK and go out like this, people stare, and local relatives say they're indecent. I've yet to personally experience all these, however, because i don't wear tank tops nor skirts. But when I read this entry, it finally struck, belately, that there is no 'influx', or if there is, it's simply because Hong Kong people in general are becoming more and more repressed.
But then this strikes me - HK people do not have an outlet for their stress, or less apparent anyways. Because I think of Japan, and their vibrant industry/culture of hentai movies and comics... hm...
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Hi Mandy-Thanks for sharing your observation, and welcome to the blog. Yes, you're right, there is this odd undercurrent of "dirty old(ish)man sexuality in Hong Kong. Do you remember the case last year of the police constable who was prosecuted for fondling a woman who'd been detained in the station? And the other case of the guy who was using his mobile phone camera to click shots underneath ladies' skirts? The public repression in Hong Kong drives sexuality underground, makes it sneaky and covert. I think you could include something else in this too: all the jau hon"candid" (that is, long-lens hidden-camera photos) of young woman pop stars and actresses getting undressed.
If there's an outlet in HK for this erotic pressure, then it may be through technology--hidden cameras, mobile phones, the Internet. All of which allow sexuality to be experienced as something that's voyeuristic, hidden, covert. And distanced, rather than real and personal.
I'm also aware that sexual violence is a big problem in Hong Kong. However it mainly happens behind closed doors, hidden from sight.
Standards of women's dress are somewhat more conservative in HK (ha! except in the gwailo enclaves of Central), but I think it is more correct to say that standards of dress for women are more relaxed in the U.S. (particularly California) than anywhere else in the world. Actually, I'm sometimes taken aback by what girls wear out on the streets in New York and CA! I guess that makes me and Ah Yi....
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The guards at your viewing of "Lust, Caution" were almost certainly searching for pirates - not anything else. Most really high-profile films released in Hong Kong these days gets a similar treatment. The same thing happened to me at "Star Wars: Episode III."
The guards are doing a good job, too; I've just checked all the major hubs for pirated movies online, and there has been no appearance whatsoever of "Lust, Caution," though other movies that have been screening a shorter time -- "Michael Clayton," for example -- are widely available. When I saw "Michael Clayton" here in Hong Kong, there were no guards anywhere.
It's just absurd to imagine that the guards at your viewing of "Lust, Caution" were checking for anything other than pirates.
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This is for your information about a talk in Cantonese - "On Reading Eileen Chang with her thirty treasures" - to be given by Roland Soong, administrator of Eileen Chang’s estate on in HKU Library on Nov 5 at 7pm - 9pm. Registration is required. Check out
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