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Quarterly Review of Film & Video

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Chungking express: Walking with a map of desire in the mirage of the global city

Tsung‐Yi Huang

To cite this article: Tsung‐Yi Huang (2001) Chungking�express: Walking with a map of desire in the mirage of the global city, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 18:2, 129-142, DOI: 10.1080/10509200109361519

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200109361519

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Quar. Rev. of Film & Video, Vol. 18(2), pp. 129-142 © 2001 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under Photocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,

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Chungking Express: Walking with a Map of Desire in the Mirage of the Global City

Tsung-Yi Huang

Hong Kong's urban space has been shaped by the forces of a dual compression: global compression, space collapsing to serve the purpose of global capital accu- mulation, and local compression, space collapsing to accommodate urban densities of population and housing, aggravated by global compression. Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, a 1994 urban film about the sensory experience of walking in Hong Kong, vividly illustrates how walking as a spatial practice interacts with the global city, where global and local compression come into play. In Chungking Express, walking is a compulsory activity for the city-dwellers: a personal attempt to create more space physical or imaginary, commercial or social, ephemeral or enduring, in a space of constant dual compression between global flows and local concentration. Specifically, the film delineates the walking experience in such a conflicting space as one that oscillates wildly between yearning and frustration, a consequence of an unbridgeable gap between the micro perception and the macro account of the global space. In the discussion below, a brief summary of how walkers in the film savor bitterness and sweetness in turn ushers a close reading of the main characters' respective walking journeys. My exploration aims to examine how the flaneur's habitat in the metropolis, redefined by technology and global capital, changes the experience of walking and seeing in the city. If walking means access to freedom for the flaneur's, and globalization appears to blur the boundaries between human beings and their living environment, can we argue that walking in the global city is an epitome of freedom and liberation? If so, how do we account for the melancholy and frustration inherent in the walkers' experi- ence in the film? According to Michel de Certeau, pedestrians' wild footsteps are transgressive and liberating in a world constructed by the panopticon power: the macro-discourse of the urban system cannot contain the wild footsteps of city walkers; rather, it is pedestrians that (re)shape the city. I would like to consider the possibility that the subversive power of walking in the global city may be

TSUNG-YI HUANG teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, SUNY Stony Brook. She is working on a project entitled "Walking Amidst Slums and Skyscrapers: The Politics of Walking and the Myth of Freedom in Asian Global Cities."

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more illusory than what de Certeau contends, by examining how globalization acts upon the city-walkers in Hong Kong.

SPACE OF FANTASY/MAP OF DESIRE

Chungking Express contains two stories about four walkers, two policemen and two women: among the labyrinthine storefronts, beehive buildings, dingy apartments, crowded streets, these walkers respectively map out their own paths of desire, their desire to cope with the disconnection they feel from the city, to probe the living space of others, and to dream their global dreams. Their highly compartmentalized and interiorized living space, circumscribed by the dual compression I have described as operating in Hong Kong, aggravates the emblematic sense of isolation and loneliness rampant in a big city. Walking, as a daily practice, crystallizes the walkers' longing for more space, a longing particularly poignant in Hong Kong, one of the most populated cities in the world. In a sense, walking becomes therapeutic for the alienated walkers: it serves as an antidote, to temporarily relieve the syndromes resulting from "wondering lonely in the crowd," the unbearable malady of being left out in a big city. Walking makes what lies beyond the limited private space seem accessible.

In addition, the widespread hyper-dense beehive buildings in Hong Kong intensify a characteristic yearning of city walkers, deepening their voyeuristic curiosity about the invisible space of others. The walkers in Chungking Express display such desire to expose the hidden corners of the architectures/buildings of the city maze, de-compartmentalizing the mysterious beehive space, and mapping out a legible city for themselves. Most significantly, global capital flows continuously promise local people the dream of globalization, an inevitable trend with its trademark space as one of freedom, convenience, chance, and fluidity. Living and walking in such a space, people in Hong Kong are spoon-fed the glorious global dream, which assures a most prosperous space for all of its city-dwellers. The fast changing spatial configuration in Hong Kong emerges as a consequence of this long-lasting global dream, which takes the form of daily reality. The urban space of Hong Kong embedded within such a narrative of global progress thus turns out to be a space of fantasy for its walkers to inscribe their own desire and dreams, a space glossed over by the grand rhetoric of globalization.

LOST IN A BIG CITY: GLOBAL SPACE AS A MIRAGE

The four walkers in Chungking Express are connected in some way at sometime in the city, but the chance encounters seldom entail reciprocity, a return gaze that haunts the flaneurs since Baudelaire's time. Their yearning for intimacy appears to be doomed, and despite their knowledge of Hong Kong, these walkers seem to be disoriented in the city. Why do their journeys in the city convey a strong sense of loss and melancholy? I suggest we start with the walkers' cognitive mapping of their city space: what do they know about global space? How do they experience the global city as they brush shoulders with millions of others on daily basis?

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Is the "global space" the walkers encounter in everyday life the monumental space in Central (studded by skyscrapers like Bank of China and Bank of Shang- hai), the tourist district in Tsim Sha Tsui (home of fancy hotels such as Peninsula and Regent), or the rich residential area in the Peak? If not, what corners on the map of Hong Kong correspond to the "lived" global space for these walkers? I would argue that the deeply ingrained belief in their global city as a space of convenience and chance for everyone proposes a way to grasp the walkers' frustration from walking in the global city. Walking in a city where the glamorous zone is repeatedly promulgated by the official account of global space to such an extent that it becomes the only visible space, these walkers cannot see the dubious nature of the inflated global city: a convenient door that invites them to fantasize all kinds of possibilities camouflages an invisible wall that hampers their desires and dreams.

FEMME FATALE OR DISORIENTED DUPE: THE WOMAN WALKER WITH A BLONDE WIG AND A WRONG MAP

The first walker's desire and frustration, centering on transnational heroin smug- gling, serves as a textbook example of being fatally anesthetized by the ideology of global city as a place where dreams come true, dealers and dreamers alike. The opening shots of some run-down buildings introduce us to this mysterious woman walker: an Asian with a blonde wig, sunglasses, and a raincoat. The image of such a femme-fatale walker plays on the stereotype of female "streetwalker," a prostitute who goes after her business in the street, an enigmatic beautiful sexual object whose walking in the city attracts the male gaze in film noir. Yet the business of Chungking Express' femme fatale is not prostitution, but drug dealing, and the attempt to eroticize her walking meets with discontent.

First this unknown woman walks to connect her supplier and the hired hands; she then walks in the city all day with a gun looking for her Indian accomplice after they disappear at the airport. What this femme fatale expects from walking in the city is personal material gains from transnational money flows. It is a long standing myth that Hong Kong offers nothing if not the opportunity to make money, a commercial space for all, and our mysterious woman walker is not exempt from such ideology. From a trendy bar to hidden corners of the beehive building, from mean streets to the airport, she walks in the city with an inflated map provided by the official account of Hong Kong as a global city, a materially well-endowed metropolis where one can always find the means to better-off days. The blonde-wigged walker's over-investment in the smooth capital transactions via Hong Kong, legal or not, makes her an ill-fated dupe in the game from the very beginning.

The female drug-smuggler's walking highlights three sites that demonstrate different aspects of the dual global/local compression in Hong Kong: a bar in Central, Chungking Mansion in Tsim Sha Tsui, and the Kai Tak airport, each deviating from her imaginary global city respectively. The path she takes to reach her global dream turns out to be a nightmare, because of her optimistic reading of these global spaces as convenient, controllable, and legible. Before visiting the dark corners of Chungking Mansion, the woman walker stops by the bar where

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her "boss" and lover, a white bartender, gives her a paper bag presumably filled with heroin and money. Little does she know that he actually betrays her and sets her up. A closer look at the locale helps to explain her apparent gullibility. What deceives the femme fatale is more the environment of the drug deal than her unfaithful partner: a fashionable bar with a white bartender at downtown area epitomizes global space to her. Her map says Hong Kong is a city where global flows converge and in her experience the bar appears to be the perfect nodal point of the global flows. The locale of the bar as a symbol of global dreams therefore makes the transnational deal look like the "real thing" to her.

The inflated map of Hong Kong's urban space takes the walker to her next stop, the famous Chungking Mansion of Tsim Sha Tsui, a tourist area famous for five star hotels and fancy shopping centers. Following her footsteps, we enter into the hidden corners of the Chungking Mansion, a rundown beehive building with numerous suites and multi-ethnic inhabitants. It is a building that exemplifies one characteristic space generated by the local and global compression: hybrid, congested, and pigeonholed. The interior of this highly compartmentalized building in fact conjures up an impression of a street full of unknown pedestrians, most of them dark-skinned, suggesting the ethnic identities of the residents. Rubbing shoulders with strangers on the narrow hallways in this dark, crowded building, the blonde-wigged woman walker steps into the suite of the Indians, who are supposed to transport the drugs for her. A sequence of quick shots shows the audience details of the deal such as the exchange of passports and US currency, the professional help from local tailors and shoe makers in the same building, and the tricks of hiding the drugs in every possible place in the "tourists" luggage and body. These shots actually echo the woman walker's gaze: everything seems to be under her control. An abject suite in Chungking Mansion, a hidden corner of the global space, facilitates the money flows just as efficiently as any other part of the whole city machine. Not until she loses these Indians at the airport, one of the essential urban infrastructures that represents the global compression of space, is the woman agonizingly aware of the missing links in her calculated plan.

Dealing with the mixed space in Chungking Mansion with a map that max- imizes the global dream and minimizes everything else including potential threats, the blonde-wigged walker is bound to lose control of these Indians. In her mis-representing map the seedy hybrid space of Chungking Mansion signifies a contemporary version of the 19th-century slum, a resentful pollution in the "clean and proper" city of the bourgeoisie. Yet the nameless woman's profound belief in Hong Kong as a space of convenience turns the good-for-nothing slum to a reservoir of cheap labor at her mercy. Obviously, she visits the squalid corners of the global city with an out-dated version of mapping generated from nineteenth-century European cities, identifying these Indians with a stereotype of slum-dwellers, abject and thus docile enough to carry out her criminal scheme. In other words, the inhabitants of the shabby corners of Chungking Mansion are nothing but inferior sub-humans. Her condescending arrogance toward her accomplices-to-be is revealed as soon as she steps into the suite: the shot of her sitting in front of the refrigerator trying to get some cool air implies her being out of place. In a manner that recalls an inverted form of an urban planner of a concept city, who finds capital sufficient to de-slum the abject space, the blonde-wigged walker believes money

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alone can manipulate these foreigners, who flood into Hong Kong in search of opportunities to make money. Presuming an "appropriate" abject space for these "foreign laborers," she denies the possibility of them being agents of intelligence and culture. This partly explains why she cannot imagine the hired Indians will outwit her and abscond with the drugs. All of these details point apparently to the woman's impaired mapping ability, following from her preconception of the city—under the spell of global and local compression—as one in which all kinds of dealings are possible and money walks in every corner of the city, be it decent or dirty. In her mind's eye, the "slums" are just another backdoor open to cheap labor, which exists for no other reason if not money flows. Her wearing sunglasses all the time suggests her blindness to the changes taking place in a global city. Likewise, her behaving as one out of place in the corner of the Indians' room hints at her inability to map out the space of her partners. As a result, it seems natural for her to lose sight of them in the clean and proper global space—the international airport— where the fake decent tourists disappear under her nose near the airline counter. Her frustrated deal marks a false mapping of the global city, an unavoidable outcome of not being able to see what is there.

Considered closely, the mysterious woman's seemingly spontaneous appeal to a stereotypical imagination of the slums can be seen as an expedient reaction pre- scribed and circumscribed by globalization. As a city walker who has no easy access to the information flows circulating in the international banks or multi- national consortiums, i.e. the legal dealings of global capital transaction, she is con- fined to a fragmentary understanding of her environment by an unreliable map. Always situating the woman in dark and obscure corners of the city, the film implies her inability to transcend the spatial limitations to reach for a full picture. The mysterious woman is doomed to mistake her limited vision, broken perspective and facile understanding of the global space for objective and rational spatial mapping. In other words, she takes her vision of the global space to be reality; the inflated map is regarded as an authentic one.

Throughout her journey, disorienting sequences of fragmentary camera images significantly echo the debilitated gaze of the female walker. The audience is denied the chance to see a complete picture of the suite or the building where the drug smuggling takes place. The interior of the building is presented as a com- bination of broken pieces: shots of different corners resembling pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—an eatery, a foreign cash exchange counter, an elevator, labyrinthine hallways, a shabby toilet, and small double-deck beds. The fragmentary urban images as well as the woman's impaired gaze contrast with the invisible map she resorts to, a map produced from a panopticon view with monumental space as the poster landmark of global flows, a seed bed of global dreams for those who walk on Hong Kong's sidewalks and streets.

After her frustrated attempt to recover her lost drugs, the mysterious female walker loiters in a bar. Her disappointment is analogous to the frustrated sexual relation experienced by the two male flaneurs in the film. Noticeably, both flaneurs are police officers, the reminder of state apparatuses: Cop 233 in the first story is an undercover officer, Cop 663 in the second story a low-rank patrol officer. Their profession as agents of law and order seems to be the only residual motivation for them to map out stable social relationships. These two police officers end up

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being nothing more than incompetent flaneurs, either blind to the obvious or unable to interpret what they see. From police officers to flaneurs, the shift of their roles in a sense suggests the declining importance of state apparatuses in global cities. As Arjun Appadurai argues, cities tend to replace nations as the social imaginary of citizenship as well as represent the localization of global forces.

MULTILINGUAL AS GLOBAL: THE TALKING FLANEUR LOOKING FOR A RETURN GAZE

The first flaneur we encounter, the undercover cop 233, displays a classical yearning for intimacy in a metropolis from the very beginning of the story: "we rub shoulders with each other everyday. You may not know each other. But we could become good friends someday." With such expectations in mind, flaneur 233 walks and talks to be reconnected with others, to find a return gaze, to establish a relationship that refuses to "expire" too soon. Walking is his attempt to create a social space in a promiscuous metropolis where proximity and reciprocity do not go hand in hand. His measurement of the distance between himself and the blonde-wigged woman he passes by reveals not only his romantic longing for reciprocity but the dramatic differences the tiniest space makes to people walking in a space of dual compression: "At the closest point, we are only 0.01 cm apart from each other. In 57 hours, I fall in love with this woman." Specifically, 233 walks to cope with the acute loneliness of living in a compressing space. This cop-turned-flaneur defines his global city as a multi-lingual, hybrid space composed of various ethnic com- munities. Walking and talking in the city, 233 imagines being connected with others instead of just passing by the anonymous crowd and thus repeating the sexual frustration experienced by Baudelairean flaneurs, the melancholy of "love at last sight." Like the tormented spirit in Baudelaire's famous sonnet "A une passante," 223 is fascinated by a woman passing by in the street and doomed to miss his object of desire forever after that fleeting chance encounter. As Benjamin explains, "the delight of the urban poet is love—not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment" (1969:169).

Flaneur 233's first attempt to create some social space by speaking multiple lan- guages takes place in front of the fast food counter, Midnight Express, where he makes phone calls from the public phone in the hope of reaching for substantial interaction after being jilted by his girlfriend, May. The shot of the setting suggests the global space 233 experiences on daily basis: the fast food joint serves as a microcosm of Hong Kong's compressed space. A "next door uncle" type of guy runs Midnight Express with local workers and foreign laborers changing at the speed of people walking through a revolving door. This small shop front located at the periphery of the glamorous Central district shines with a colorful Coca-Cola neon sign, echoing those high rise office buildings in the same area dazzling with multinational corporate names. Midnight Express is nothing fancy, selling multi- cultural fast food from chef's salad to Middle Eastern barbecue. Yet the owner's habit of chatting with his customers attracts the lonely flaneurs; Midnight Express thus turns out to be a stopover for both cops in the film. This multicultural global

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space represented by Midnight Express is a miniature of the global city as experi- enced by 233, physically adjacent to the high rise buildings in the same district but functionally apart from the captivating skyscrapers.

In front of the multicultural fast food counter, 233's telephone marathon starts with May's parents, seeking a vicarious intimacy with his ex-girlfriend but in vain. They keep the conversation curt with polite distance. 233 then tries his luck by making three calls to female acquaintances from the past. He speaks to these women in Cantonese, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese over the phone, hoping that speaking their languages can overcome the distance imposed by time and space. None of these women satisfies 233's longing for a return gaze. The shot of the dangling down receiver of the public phone parallels the lonely walker in the street, suggesting his fruitless search for an imaginary community.

Like the archetypal flaneur Benjamin portrays, 233 is deprived of the experience of the aura, the emotional association with the world. The expectation of the reciprocal gaze is an index to \he flaneur's desire to communicate with others, to establish a substantial interpersonal relationship. However, instead of returning his look, the crowd moves on with "inhuman makeup." To be more specific, the flaneur in a modern city is doomed to experience melancholy in the crowd since what he is looking for, a homogeneous community, is gone forever from the city. Confronting a heterogeneous metropolis made up of different kinds of commu- nities, 233 still clings to his belief in a homogeneous social space. Multilingual proficiency is thus imagined as his magic power of retrieving the lost community: he not only looks but talks while walking. Ironically, he cannot see what is there, and all he hears is finally the echo of his own mumbling.

Flaneur 233's frustration from imagining the heterogeneous global space as one that can be broken down into different homogeneous communities through lan- guages is best demonstrated by his chance encounter with the blonde woman in a bar, where he approaches this mysterious woman in four languages. After her futile hunt for the runaway couriers, the woman drinks alone to vent her anger and frustration from walking all day in the city. Subject to the stereotype of a single woman drinking alone, 233 attempts to chat with this "broken-hearted" woman in different tongues. Unable to pin down her identity right away, 233 has to ask the same question four times—in Cantonese, Japanese, English, and finally in Mandarin Chinese. Patronizing the seemingly fragile woman, 233 chauvinistic- ally offers generous consolation, saying in an understanding tone that it is so obvi- ous to him that a woman can only wear sunglasses at a bar for three reasons: she is blind, pretentious, or heart-broken. Beyond doubt, a pretty woman like her falls into the last category. His multilingual vocabulary fails the occasion; ironically, here the hunter/prey signifier instead of pointing to the police/criminal opposi- tional pair (an undercover officer is supposed to find out this woman's illegal deal- ings), turns to signify the melodramatic sexual relation between man and woman. As a plain-clothes cop, 223's understanding of global space is boiled down to a promiscuous multicultural society, with language proficiency his only pass to the segregated compartments.

Circumscribed by his global dream, the flaneur/ officer is fated to miss his prey. They two end up in a hotel room, with the exhausted woman walker sleeping in bed, and the flaneur eating chef's salad and watching Cantonese dramas on TV.

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The flaneur's desire to eroticize his potential prey in a private space, usually associ- ated with women, remains unsatisfied on account of his narrow definition of the global city. He might be able to speak her language, but it is naive to assume that common languages guarantee reciprocity. The frustrated sexual relation between the flaneur /cop and the mysterious woman proves again the attenuation of the state's power and the always-deferred sexual satisfaction of the flaneur. As Elizabeth Wilson notes, city as a labyrinth designates the decline of masculine power: "voyeurism and commodification lead to the attenuation and deferral of satisfaction"(74). 233's chance encounter with the woman walker, first appearing as a love at the last sight on the street, indicates that 233 not only fails in his official job as a detective, but as a flaneur, traditionally shrewd and observant.

Indeed, 233's habitual dependence on talking as the means to a return gaze reveals how the convergence of multiple languages and discourses in a global city, easily translated to the ideology of a melting-pot community, becomes another version of the global mirage spellbinding its pedestrians. As Alexander Cuthbert points out, "Hong Kong is crossing an ideological tightrope from the discourse of capitalism to that of socialism"(1995:145). Conflating the totality of social reality in the global city with multilingual, a single linguistic phenomenon of a multicultural society formed by the interaction of global and local compression, the flaneur derails himself from his quest for an accessible social space. Globalization and its manipulative compression inflict a sugarcoated affliction, whose source remains unrecognizable. Unable to find the return gaze, 233's failed attempts to retrieve the lost community with his multilingual proficiency herald the mire of melancholy, which takes the form of nostalgia.

The pineapple episode spells out the nostalgia of a flaneur looking for compassion in a city of compression. Breaking up with his girlfriend May on the first of April, he decides to wait for her one month, which is evidently an excuse for him to disavow the fact that May will never come back to him. During this period everyday he buys one pineapple can that expires on the first of May, as pineapple is his girlfriend's favorite fruit. Displacing his desire to hold on to his lost love/space into the act of buying pineapple cans, 233 seeks to recover the sense of order and stability.

233's conversation with the salesperson at OK convenience store, a transnational franchised convenience stores in Asia, expresses a strong sense of the flaneur's nostalgia. Upon addressing the question if they still carry pineapple cans that expire in two hours, the clerk tells 233 to get something fresh; nobody wants expired goods. 233's ensuing accusation marks out the archetypal nostalgia, a longing for harmonious relationships between subject and object in a world less dominated by technology, consumption and rationality than his Hong Kong: "People like you always go for something fresh. You know how much effort is put in a can of pineapples? The farming, the cropping, and the slicing. Throwing it out like that. Have you ever thought about the can's feeling?" Obviously, 233 identifies with the thrown away pineapple cans: the fast changing global space disrupts the aura tic relationship between self and other. His Quixotic ideal is unthinkable for the clerk, who voices a much more pragmatic and cynical viewpoint: "Buddy, I sell here. And I have to think about the can's feeling? Have you thought about my feelings? The loading, more loading, and unloading. How I wish those cans won't expire. That'd have saved me lots of work!" Life is too short to be

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philosophical. Frustrated by their conversation, 233 steps outside of the store to sit on the stairs, pondering, "[s]omewhere, somehow everything comes with an expiration date. Swordfish will expire. Meat sauce will expire. Even Glad wrap will expire. I wonder if there's anything in the world that won't expire?" Through the camera's eye, we see 233's lonely figure, a dark shadow with only silhouette visible. Notably, this dark figure contrasts with the background of the convenience store, a colorful world of commodities which has forgotten the process of production: the wine shelf basked in the bright lights, the fridge filled up with foods and drinks in the store, and the gigantic ice cream advertisement dazzling below the glass window of the storefront. The nostalgic flaneur is an anthropological species facing the danger of extinction in the world where turnover time predominates. The scene that seems to foreshadow the demise of nostalgic flaneurs in a global city is disrupted by another passing shadow, a small old lady who picks up whatever she can find of value on the streets, an updated form of the 19th century rag picker. 233 figures she might appreciate the value of expired cans and thus share with him the mourning for what cannot be found in the city of commodity. Again his search for a return gaze only invites blunt rejection: "Expired cans? I don't want it."

233's resistance to the expiration date along with his plan of buying pineapple cans for a month to defer the loss of love signifies a shock defense in the form of creating an alternative, private temporality to counter the devastating space/time compression imposed by global capital flows. When 233 is ultimately fed up with those piles of cans, he realizes that what he incorporates is the canned pineapple rather than his lost love. His idiosyncratic means of healing his broken heart can be interpreted as a vestige of the 19th century flaneur's attempt to put off the loss, analogous to the Baudelairean/Zanewr-poet's efforts of elaborating the "love at the last sight," which registers more than anything else the melancholy of walking in a modern city. In fact, 233's password to his voicemail system, "love you 10,000 years" speaks for his desire for a less mutable space.

AIRPORT/GLOBAL SPACE/WOMEN: THE SELF-PITY FLANEUR

While flaneur 233's global dream is cacophonous, flaneur 663's is monotonous: the only audible sound in his global dream, the uproar of airplanes, has been magically transcribed to a serenade of love. 663's obsession with flight attendants and airplanes implies that for this cop-turned-/Zflnewr, airport embodies the global spaces, a syn- onym of sexual relationship in his lexicon. The spatial form which caters to the demands of the new user of the city, the white-collared service class in the global city ironically becomes the quintessential global space for someone outside of this class, a low-rank petrol officer, who spends most of his time walking in the streets rather than flying in and out of Hong Kong. Throughout 663's journey, his fascination with airplanes and flying parallels his yearning for love. Against the backdrop of an airplane taking off, 663's voiceover narrates his brief relationship with a curvy flight attendant: "On board every flight, there must be an attendant you want to seduce. This time last year 25,000 feet above sea level, I successfully seduced one." Next shot introduces us to his apartment with 663 flying a model

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plane in his hand, chasing his flight attendant girlfriend in her bra and uniform skirt. After sex he plays with the miniature plane over her naked body, the voiceover telling us where the rest of the story goes: "I thought we two would stay together a long time, flying all the way like a plane with a full tank. I didn't know the plane was going to change course." Jilted by his girlfriend, 663 thus became lost in the global city. He copes with his loss by going home and confiding in the inanimate objects such as his towel and soap, instead of reaching out for others like his colleague 233 does. In fact, being short-leashed by the chain of global dream and women for so long, 663 no longer looks forward to any exciting chance encounters with the crowd: the urban space where he promenades everyday becomes invisible to him once the woman who represents the only global space he knows, high above in the sky rather than down on the street level, disappears from his daily life. Deprived of his global dream, domestic space turns to be the last shelter for this frustrated flaneur in the city. A shot that juxtaposes an airplane flying in the broad blue sky with his ex-girlfriend's uniform blouse on a hanger flying in the wind on the roof of his apartment building vividly illustrates 663's vanished global dream. This image, one of the few exceptional shots of open space throughout the whole film, is a follow-up of his talking to the blouse in his room: "Why are you hiding? I've been looking for you. One must face the reality. Don't hide. You are dirty. It looks like you are in the wrong season. Let's go sunbathing tomorrow." The juxtaposition of the ex-love's blouse and an airplane flying in the sky in one shot can be seen as a montage that reveals 663's yearning for a romantic relationship and his global dream as two sides of the same coin.

The devastatedyMra/r, losing receptiveness and interest due to the disappearance of the only recognizable global space in his everyday life, is later redeemed by the re-connected link between the two essential signifiers, women and global space. 663 compares his expectation of a new relationship to cleaning up the runway at the airport for the arrival of another flight. At the "California" restaurant in Central, 663 waits for Faye, the Midnight Express girl who has a huge crush on him. Again he resorts to the rhetoric of flying to describe his still up-in-the-air romantic rela-

. tionship: "I arrived at California earlier, as I suspect there's going to be a delay." A shot of blurred crowds passing by in the background highlights his loneliness. After a while, he mumbles to himself that he has a hunch the flight has been can- celled. Faye leaves him an envelope with a hand-written boarding pass valid in a year, a rain check for their romantic relationship. The truth is that she comes to their date much earlier before flying to California USA that night. Finding out that the flight changes course unexpectedly, 663 talks to a beer bottle in the restaurant, convincing himself that Faye does come to California, just another one: "she was there that night, just a different place. The two of us went to California that night. Only there was a time difference of 15 hours. The time now at California is 11 am. At 8 PM will she remember she has a date with me?" The two Californias, California State in the US, and the trendy restaurant named California at Lan Kwai Fong, come into play with 663's global dream. All the fancy bars and restaurants with the names of foreign places at Lan Kwai Fong create the illusion that Hong Kong is a microcosm of the world and that the global space is within easy reach. However, that night at the California restaurant flaneur 663 painfully grasps the physical distance between the two Californias.

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Interestingly, no more confined by the narrow space of Midnight Express, Faye "flies away" when 663 finally gets ready to start a relationship with her. When she comes back as a flight attendant, dressed the same as his ex-girlfriend, the link between woman and global space seems to be completely restored. Their story finishes with a dramatic role change at Midnight Express: 663 as the owner of Midnight Express standing behind the counter talking to Faye, the flight attendant, at the other side of the counter. Showing Faye the blurred "boarding pass" as a token of promise and affection, 663 starts to indulge in his next cycle of global dream. Lisa Stokes and Michael Hoover consider this change as one of the many changes requires explanation in the film: how does 663 afford purchasing the fast- food counter? (196) Yet his taking over Midnight Express from the owner, who newly opens a Karaoke, can also be regarded as realistic examples of Hong Kong's fast changing space.

CALIFORNIA DREAMING IN HONG KONG: THE FEMALE FLANEUR AS A MIRROR

If the blonde-wigged woman and the two cops-turned-flaneurs in Chungking Express point to the gap between the private and public accounts of Hong Kong as a global city of dual compression, the last walker, Faye, a female flaneur, elucidates the global effects on strolling in the city, crystallizing police officer 663's fldneurie as an allegory of walking in Hong Kong. Faye's improvised walk, from Midnight Express through local street markets to the apartment of officer 663, fleshes out not only an image of the female flaneur in a global city, but also the rampant effects of global mirage on the walkers, embodied by officer 663's numbness to the fast changing environment in the global city. Such numbness as a negative reaction to the global metropolis is an extreme form of what Simmel explains in "Metropolis and Mental Life," "the blase attitude" urbanites develop toward the overwhelming stimulus of city life:

[tjhere is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blase attitude. The blase attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blase because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. (414)

The numbness is different from what Benjamin defines as "shock defense" in that the latter implies an endeavor to assert the consciousness of the self/subjectivity.

Faye is introduced to us as a lower-middle class girl, working for her cousin at Midnight Express. Originally she walks as a classical type of woman walker, whose justification for walking on the streets is shopping. Getting the key to 663's apartment from the envelope left by his flight attendant girlfriend, Faye transforms her journey of running errands to an excursion of desire. She extends her daily routine of shopping at traditional markets or paying the electricity bill for Midnight Express to 663's apartment. Her voiceover confesses her stray: "Yesterday I dreamed about visiting his place. When I left his home, I thought I would wake up. But for some dreams you will never wake up." Working at Midnight Express, Faye seems to be confined by the limited space of the fast food stand, separated

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from the crowd by the counter. Yet from the very beginning Faye destabilizes her image as a woman constrained by space with her improvised dancing at work. Dancing to her favorite song "California Dreamin'," with pots and pans in hands, Faye somehow manages to liberate herself from the claustrophobic and monotonous space of Midnight Express. Instead of following the route prescribed for her, Faye sneaks into 663's apartment, justifying her detour by "sleepwalking." As Anke Gleber notes, "limited excursions of shopping in a prescribed ghetto of consumption amount to little more than secondhand distraction, never approximating the flaneur's wide-reaching mode of perception, unimpeded by aims, purposes, and sched- ules"^) . Refusing the rudimentary form of the female flaneur, i.e., aim-oriented walking, which precludes woman walkers from experiencing the city with an active gaze, Faye magically turns her functional walking to an exciting stroll which displays the possibility of female scopophilia and an unhampered female flaneur on the streets of Hong Kong. More importantly, her privatizing the officer's private space, the destination of her walk, traces the concealed link between the forces of globalization and its effects on the local walkers.

Fay's excursion to the hidden corner of the apartment of 663 exemplifies the voyeuristic desire of those confined by the compartmentalized space in the global city. For one thing, her active female gaze contrasts with flaneur 663's impaired vision. Seeing this apartment as her personal playground, Faye derives pleasure not only from cleaning up his house, but also from arranging various details of his private space in the hope of fashioning a new identity for 663. Yet 663 turns a blind eye to the differences, unaware of the fact that home has become a strange place transformed in every little corner. The new table cloth and bed sheets are as invisible as the tranquilizer put in the bottle of drinking water. He neither notices the increasing number of gold fish in the tank nor the changed photos on the mirror. The unobservant 663 does not suspect that someone deletes his phone messages and uses a magnifier to look for any clue to his sex life in his bed. His numbness to the changes in his private space is further elaborated by his quick acceptance of the changes around him. He talks to the Garfield stuffed toy, the replacement for his stuffed white dog, as if they were the same: "why do you turn yourself yellow? And a scar? Did you fight with anyone?" Eating his black bean sardine can, 663 puzzles at the striking similarity between tomato tuna (says the label) and black bean sardine (tastes the content), completely unaware that labels of the original sardine cans have been changed. The CD of "California Dreaming," placed in his disk player by Faye, soon turns out to be his ex-girlfriend's favorite. When Faye asks him when he started to like this song, his answer is "I don't care. My girlfriend likes it." Here the common association between home and familiarity presents itself to be an irony. Frustrated by the global mirage while walking in the city, 663 turns to his private space as the last sanctuary of self-pity and consolation. Ironically, even his home is metamorphosed into a strange place without his knowledge. Indeed, flaneur 663 can be seen as an antithetical form of classical flaneur who enjoys the privilege of being at home in the world. It seems that flaneur 663 is homeless not only on the streets but also within his four walls.

663's slow response to the changes under his own roof is not beyond compre- hension if we read it against Hong Kong's distinctive global space. Specifically, Faye's changing every detail at 663's apartment with her gaze corresponds to one

Chungking Express 141

significant consequence of global forces, that of defamiliarizing the familiar. To some extent, 663's blindness to the numerous changes in his private space is symptomatic of walkers in Hong Kong, who are constantly susceptible to the always changing urban space brought about by global and local compression. The speed of spatial change, a consequence of the disjuncture of dual compression, renders Hong Kong a "space of disappearance:" the combination of rising land prices, property speculation, and the presence of large corporations vying for prime space results in a constant rebuilding that makes the city subtly unrecognizable" (Abbas, 63). In other words, the social and spatial reality produced by the dual compression often outruns the walkers' perception and understanding. One common response to the overwhelming mutability of the global space is numbness, the waning affective in Jameson's postmodern terminology. Numbness registers a negative response to the changing lived space, where the sense of the order of things challenges recognition: "the skewing of affectivity is the only 'content' and displaced index of such a space. It is a space that is at once very much there (in the effects it can produce) and not there (as directly discernible cause)" (Abbas, 53). Seen in this light, 663 represents the "every man" walking in Hong Kong, suffering from what Abbas defines as "reverse hallucination," unable to see the obvious. Trained by the kaleidoscopic, fast-changing sights in the global city, the inhabitants' gaze becomes less and less receptive to the differences between what is new and unique and what is obsolete and commonplace.

Faye's adventure at 663's apartment interestingly challenges the definition of private space as closed and secret: 663's yearning for global space, rendering his supposedly closed private space open and accessible to others, mirrors Hong Kong's status as a port city, opening up its space for global flows. What stands for global flows in the apartment episode is his ex-girlfriend, the beautiful flight attendant rather than Faye, then a local girl working at fast food counter. Faye can turn 663's home into a hotel room and herself into the voyeuristic maid because 663 has already opened up his private space for his girlfriend to come and go and arrange everything as she wishes. The flight attendant girlfriend, or in Faye's case, whoever gets the key, has as much right as 663 himself to his apartment. These two women's free pass to 663's private space allegorizes Hong Kong's local responses to global forces in two aspects. For one thing, the easy accessibility of 663's apartment suggests the consequence of the local, non-economic profitable space being invaded by the global flux, with 663 standing for the local, nation-state residue, and aggressive women, shifting manipulative global space. Furthermore, the local police officer's desire for the global flows, epitomized by his flight attendant girlfriend, embodies Hong Kong people's infatuation with globalization, an ideology formulated by the public account of the global city. The ideology of inviting global flows lingers even after China's takeover: after France, Hong Kong will join the Disneyland franchise soon after the millennium. To the walkers on the city streets, spatial changes underpinned by such an ideology, shoved in their face everyday, are paradoxically overriding but indiscernible.

Walking in Hong Kong as represented in Chungking Express registers a cycle of yearning and frustration due to the optimistic conception of their global city as brimming with possibilities and freedom. Polls in 1980s showed that Hong Kong residents considered their city "a land full of opportunities" despite the fact that

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"Hong Kong's economic success under a laissez-faire policy did not trickle down to reach each and every member of the community fairly" (Lau, 80-1). The myth that globalization necessarily guarantees a prosperous future is implanted in the consciousness of many people in Hong Kong. Given the spatial configurations calibrated to global flows become daily realities in life, hardly can anyone be detached from the global dream. In Chungking Express the elusive global space, the hidden source that over-determines the spatial practice of walking in Hong Kong, partly accounts for the underlying drift of urbanites' emotions, rendering their pain and fears unspeakable, desires and pleasure uncertain. The flaneur in a global city is like Tantalus, caught between prohibitions and possibilities under the space-time compression.

WORKS CITED

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Appadurai, Arjun, and James Holston. "Cities and Citizenship," Public Culture 8.2 (1996): 187-204. Benjamin, Walter. "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry

Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969:155-200. Cuthbert, Alexander. "Under the Volcano: Postmodern Space in Hong Kong," Postmodern Cities and

Spaces. Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995:138-48 Gleber, Anke. "Women on the Screen and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flâneur," The

Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography. Ed. Dudley Andrew. U of Texas P, 1997: 55-85.

Lau, Chi Kuen. Hong Kong's Colonial Legacy. Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1997. Simmel, Georg. "The Metropolis and Mental Life," The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Kurt H. Wolff.

Illinois: Free Press, 1950:409-24. Stokes, Lisa Odham, and Michael Hoover. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. New York: Verso, 1999. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: U of

California P, 1991.