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University of Hawai'i Press Chapter Title: Travelling Sexualities: Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together

Book Title: Celluloid Comrades Book Subtitle: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas Book Author(s): Song Hwee Lim Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2006) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqwhf.9

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Wong Kar-wai is undoubtedly the most hip director in contempo-rary Chinese cinemas and enjoys a cult following worldwide.1 His debut film, As Tears Go By (Wangjiao Kamen, also known as Rexue nan’er, 1988), brought him critical attention in Hong Kong, but it was his subse- quent films such as Days of Being Wild (A Fei zhengzhuan, 1990), Ashes of Time (Dongxie Xidu 1994), Chungking Express (Chongqing senlin, 1994), and Fallen Angels (Duoluo tianshi, 1995) that propelled him to international sta- tus. In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000) won Tony Leung Chiu- wai the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Wong’s latest film was the long-awaited 2046, which was released in 2004. My focus in this chapter is his 1997 film, Happy Together, which won him the best director award at Cannes.

Shot in Argentina, geographically the antipodes of Hong Kong, Happy Together is a film simultaneously about home and being away from home. The film problematizes the intertwining relationship between sexuality, home, nation, and space. In this chapter, I propose to examine the trope of travel and how sexuality is negotiated vis-à-vis the diasporic identities of the protagonists. I want to raise the following questions: What does it mean to negotiate sexuality in a diasporic space as opposed to doing so at home? In what ways are the material conditions of travel and diaspora related to the figure of homosexuality in these representations? Or, to adapt James Clifford’s questions in the epigraph above, how do different sexualities travel, and what kinds of representations do they produce? What is the relationship between the trope of travel, the locales of home and away, and sexuality?

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Travelling Sexualities Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together

How do different populations, classes and genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do they produce?

— James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory”

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Happy Together has been described as belonging to “the genre of the ‘road movie’ where the travel metaphor becomes a search for ‘home’ and ‘identity’ through the three male protagonists’ (individual and collective) quests” (Yue 2000, 254). For Iain Chambers, to travel “implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowl- edge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential home- coming” (1994, 5). Many discourses of travel and diaspora are embedded in a dialectic relationship with the notion of home as the origin of jour- neys to which one can eventually return from one’s journeys. It is thus appropriate that I begin my discussion by situating Happy Together in the context of the home, which is Hong Kong and its return to the PRC on July 1, 1997.

Deviance and Defiance: Happy Together?

Inspired by Manuel Puig’s novel The Buenos Aires Affair, Happy Together traces the troubled relationship between Ho Po-wing (the late Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing; henceforth Po-wing) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung; henceforth Fai).2 The film is narrated mainly from Fai’s point of view via voice-over, a trademark of Wong’s films. In the opening sequence, the couple is in a hotel room, where Po-wing suggests to Fai that they start over. An explicit sex scene between the couple follows, accompanied by Fai’s voice-over: “‘Let’s start over’—these are Ho Po-wing’s favorite words. I admit these words are a killer for me. We’ve been together for a long time, and we’d broken up before in the process. But I don’t know why each time I hear him utter these words to me, I’ll be back with him again. Because of wanting to start over, I left Hong Kong with him. As we travelled, we ended up in Argentina.”3 The opening sex scene is almost a shock tactic towards the audience, as there are subsequently no more sex scenes between the couple, and none of the other sex scenes in Happy Together is quite as explicit. It recalls Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 film, Betty Blue: 37˚2 le matin, which also features an opening sex scene (albeit hetero- sexual in this case) accompanied by the voice-over of the male protagonist, Zorg: “I have known Betty for a week. We made love every night. The forecast was for storms.” The voice-over in both films provides an account of the history of the relationships between the protagonists.

The trope of travel is highlighted right from the start of Happy Together: inspired by a picture of the Iguazu Falls on a lampshade that Po-wing bought when the couple first arrived in Argentina, the couple embarks on a journey to the falls. Zorg’s last sentence above also applies to the couple in Happy Together as, following the opening sex scene, the

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film shows their stormy relationship: they quarrel as they lose their way on the trip to the Iguazu Falls, and Po-wing suggests they break up and start over if they meet again. Back in Buenos Aires, Fai works as a door- man at a tango bar, whereas Po-wing survives by hustling. The couple is reunited after Po-wing has been severely beaten up by one of his sex tricks. Ministering to Po-wing’s injury but keeping his passport, Fai regards Po- wing’s recovery period as their happiest time together. During this period, Fai spots the man responsible for Po-wing’s injury and hits him with a bottle, thus losing his job at the tango bar. He subsequently works in a kitchen at a Chinese restaurant with a young man from Taiwan, Chang (Chang Chen). Fai and Po-wing break up again after the latter has recov- ered. Chang quits his job to travel to Ushuaia before returning to Taiwan. Fai starts a new job at an abattoir. Saving enough money, Fai travels to the Iguazu Falls. Po-wing moves into the apartment previously occupied by Fai, where Fai has left Po-wing’s passport. Fai returns to Hong Kong but stops over en route in Taipei in search of Chang.

In her analysis of Happy Together, Rey Chow consciously departs from the tendency, whenever a non-Western work is being analyzed, “to affix a kind of reflectionist value by way of geopolitical realism—so that a film made in Hong Kong around 1997, for instance, would invariably be approached as having something to do with the factographic ‘reality’ of Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China” (1999, 32). While I sympathize with Chow’s desire to “counter the analytically reductionist readings, ubiquitous inside and outside the academy” (ibid.), I agree with Helen Hok-sze Leung, who, in her response to Chow’s stance, argues that “to approach the film text as though it were hermetically sealed from the historic moment of its production also seems to me an untenable tactic” (2001, 446–447n27).4 Drawing references from the film’s diegesis, I will illustrate below why a reading of Happy Together cannot be totally divorced from the geopolitical context of 1997. One could in fact argue that 1997 serves as the main impetus for the production of the film.

For Ackbar Abbas, July 1, 1997, “is not just a terminal date that falls sometime in the future” but, for the time leading up to it, also serves as “an ever-present irritant, a provocation, and a catalyst for change” (1997, 22). Making a film about “deviant” sexuality immediately before Hong Kong’s handover to a regime (in)famous for its high-handed treatment of homo- sexuals can be seen as an act of defiance. While authorial intention should not be taken simply at face value, it is nonetheless noteworthy that Wong reportedly said he was making Happy Together because Hong Kong needed a “real gay film” before 1997 (Liu Zeyuan 1997, 33).5 Billed as “A Story about Reunion” in one version of the film’s posters, the film’s title, Happy

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Together, works as an ironic suggestion—wishful thinking even?—that Hong Kong might be able to live happily together with its new mainland Chinese master. As Jeremy Tambling proposes, read as two interroga- tives—Happy? Together?—the film’s title also constitutes “an oxymoron,” raising the question of whether happiness and togetherness are not mutu- ally exclusive (2003, 77).

Indeed, the choice of location for the film cannot be unintentional. As Hong Kong’s antipodes, Argentina provides a direct albeit unseen fast track between the two locales through the center of the earth, underlin- ing the dialectic relationship between home and the diasporic space.6 The opening credits are set against a glaringly bright red background, a color closely associated with communist China. Inserted in between the credits is a close-up of Po-wing’s and Fai’s Hong Kong passports (issued by the British authorities) being stamped by the Argentine customs officer. The disappearance of Hong Kong from the film’s narrative, the impending change in its political status, and the tropes of travel and diaspora are simultaneously highlighted in this brief sequence. Hong Kong appears in the film only towards the end, when Fai wonders what Hong Kong might look like from Argentina, whereupon a montage of Hong Kong’s cityscapes is shown upside down, literalizing the antipodal relationship between the two locales.

Happy Together poses a defiant challenge to China’s claim to Hong Kong by introducing the factor of Taiwan, an antagonistic regime regarded as a renegade province by the PRC government. As Audrey Yue argues, “as either one or the other (of the other China), Taiwan can be considered as the third space that disrupts the reunification between Hong Kong and the Mainland” (2000, 260). Towards the end of the film, as noted, Fai transits at Taipei before returning to Hong Kong. The first scene in Taiwan—in a hotel room where Fai wakes up, specifically dated February 20, 1997—shows a televised news report of the death of Deng Xiaoping, China’s then paramount leader who had expressed his wish to witness Hong Kong’s return to China.7 Taiwan’s rebel status is reinforced as it is chosen as the site at which the denial of Deng’s wish is announced. More important, the film does not end in Hong Kong but in Taipei, where the third protagonist, Chang, provides a possibility of the promise of “happy together” for Fai, suggesting that Taiwan might become Fai’s pre- ferred home over China-ruled Hong Kong. In “A Story about Reunion,” Happy Together deliberately designates Fai’s final destination not as Hong Kong but instead as Taiwan, where a militant independence movement rejects Taiwan’s reunification with China.

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Fai and His Friends: The Fassbinder Connection

Wong’s above-mentioned comment on making a real gay film before 1997 must be understood in the context of Hong Kong cinema. Though many Hong Kong films have featured homosexual characters or touched upon the theme of homosexuality before Wong’s Happy Together, most of these are slapstick comedies littered with gay stereotypes that do not deal with the issue of homosexuality in a serious manner. While what is a (real) gay film is open to definition and debate, Happy Together is arguably the first Hong Kong film that does not pathologize or caricature its homosexual protagonists but treats them as rounded characters worthy of engagement and empathy; nor does its representation aim to problematize homosex- uality as a theme. As Tambling argues, “Happy Together contains no dis- cussions of homosexuality whatsoever, nor any moments which imply that the film is trying to argue homosexuality as ‘natural’ or to place it in any context. It makes no attempt to work, therefore, as a ‘gay’ film. Like the characters who seem to have come from nowhere, insofar as they have lack [sic] histories, homosexuality is there but it is not spoken about” (2003, 21). Tambling’s argument recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s com- ment on his 1974 film, Fox and His Friends; the comment can also be used to describe the position of Wong’s Happy Together in the context of Hong Kong cinema: “It is certainly the first film in which the characters are homosexuals, without homosexuality being made into a problem. In films, plays or novels, if homosexuals appear, then homosexuality was the prob- lem, or it was a comic turn. But here homosexuality is shown as com- pletely normal, and the problem is something quite different; it’s a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and that’s really the story I always tell” (Fassbinder 1975).

As it happens, while looking for an English (or foreign) title for the film, Wong and his crew started their brainstorming session with Fox and His Friends (Doyle 1997).8 Another title suggested was 3 Amigos (friends), the name of the bar where Fai and Chang hang out in Happy Together. For Tambling, the bar’s name is significant for both the number and the notion of friends (2003, 55), though it must be qualified that Po-wing and Chang do not know each other in the film, thus making 3 Amigos not as appropriate a foreign title as, for example, Fai and His Friends.

There is, moreover, another more significant Fassbinder connection in Wong’s film: the abattoir where Fai works is reminiscent of a similar setting in Fassbinder’s 1978 film, In a Year with 13 Moons. In the abattoir

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sequence in Happy Together, Fai pushes carcasses around (figure 4.1) and flushes the floor with a hose to wash away the blood. A shower scene in the communal bathroom of the abattoir accentuates the homoerotic fla- vor of Wong’s film.9 Fai’s voice-over accompanying this sequence reveals that Po-wing has been in touch to ask for his passport, but Fai does not want to see him for fear that Po-wing might utter those deadly words (“Let’s start over”) to him. Not totally unlike the sequences in Happy Together and Betty Blue, the opening sequence of In a Year with 13 Moons features a sex scene, but it is more of a failed attempt at having sex: dressed as a man and having successfully cruised another man in the park, Elvira, the male-to-female transsexual protagonist, is beaten up halfway into the sexual act when the man discovers that Elvira has no penis. Like Happy Together and Betty Blue, Fassbinder’s film has a voice-over recount- ing the protagonist’s relationship with his/her lover, though this voice- over does not accompany the opening but the abattoir sequence. More important, the abattoir sequence in In a Year with 13 Moons also parades carcasses around (figure 4.2) and has scenes of blood being hosed away on the floor, and it is possibly where Happy Together drew its inspiration. The two films are clearly related on the visual, aural/narratorial, and thematic levels.

For Fassbinder, a love story is invariably about the exploitation of love, and the exploitation in Fox and His Friends “has to do with the social, and not the sexual, orientation of the characters” (Thomsen 1997, 183). In Fox and His Friends, the bourgeois son of a factory owner uses the money his proletarian male lover won in a lottery to salvage his father’s ailing

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Figure 4.1. Fai pushes carcasses around in Happy Together. (Copyright Block 2 Pictures/ Prémon H./Seowoo Film/Jet Tone Production, 1997)

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business, only to dump his lover when the money dries up. If Fox and His Friends can be regarded as “a study of homosexuality and capitalism” (Shattuc 1995, 120), the social (or rather economic) condition of the pro- tagonists is the aspect that has been neglected in most discussions of Happy Together.

Travelling Identities

Caren Kaplan argues that while the terms of displacement found in Euro- American critical practice rarely admit to material conditions that include modern imperialism, industrialization, and decolonialization (1996, 1), there is a tendency that the terms and tropes of travel and the metaphors and symbols used to represent displacement refer to “individualized, often elite, circumstances” (ibid., 4). For Kaplan, to question travel is to inquire into the ideological function of metaphors in discourses of displacement and to historicize the use of terms such as “sites, borders, maps, and dias- poras as well as exile, nomadism, and migrancy” (ibid., 26).

Following Kaplan, I propose to examine the discursive terms vis-à-vis the diasporic identities of the protagonists in Happy Together. So far I have been using the term “travel” to describe the journeys the protagonists have taken from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Argentina and the terms “dias-

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Figure 4.2. Display of carcasses in Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons. (Copyright Tango- Film/Project Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978)

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pora” and “diasporic” to denote the state or condition of their existence in the space away from home. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur concur that the term “diaspora” is often used as a catchall to speak of and for all movements, “however privileged, and for all dislocations, even symbolic ones,” and hence argue that theorizations of diaspora “need not, and should not, be divorced from historical and cultural specificity” (2003, 3). It is my contention that the protagonists in Happy Together pose taxonom- ical, and thus epistemological, challenges to the trope of travel and that it is precisely the historical and cultural specificities that shore up the many discursive terms associated with diaspora that are far from clear-cut.

For example, Clifford has argued that diaspora is different from travel in that it is not temporary. It involves “dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home (and in this it is different from exile, with its frequently individualistic focus)” (1997, 287). Clifford distin- guishes travel from diaspora on the basis of temporality. However, as he has rightly asked in the context of “Fourth world [indigenous] peoples” claiming “‘first-nation’ sovereignty”—“How long does it take to become ‘indigenous’?” (ibid., 288–289)—could we not also ask, “How long does it take for a traveller to become diasporic?” In Happy Together, the pro- tagonists begin their journeys as travellers to Argentina but end up stay- ing there for longer than intended as they have run out of money. Fai and Chang subsequently become what can be classified as (illegal) guest- workers, whereas Po-wing’s economic dependence on his tricks and on Fai is even harder to define. These characters do not necessarily seek to integrate with their host country or with an existent overseas Chinese community, but as time passes, their status as travellers metamorphoses into a diasporic condition that may yet defy taxonomical classification. As Caren Kaplan notes, “The fact that the material conditions of displace- ment for many people blur these distinctions or that many modern sub- jects may participate in any number of these versions of displacement over a lifetime—never embodying any one version singly or simplistically— requires material histories of cultural production that would emphasize emergent subject positions and critical and cultural practices that are more responsive to transnational conditions” (1996, 110).

This is one of the reasons why Chow’s alternative strategy of reading Happy Together in terms of Lacanian post-structuralism and Freudian psy- choanalysis may not be any less problematic than a (possibly reductionist) geopolitical one, especially since, as Kaplan points out, dislocation is often expressed “in singular rather than collective terms, as purely psychologi- cal or aesthetic situations rather than as a result of historical circum- stances” (C. Kaplan 1996, 4). While there is no suggestion that the char-

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acters in Happy Together are leaving Hong Kong because of the political changes about to happen in 1997 (Tambling 2003, 21), in light of the geo- political reality it is certainly not far-fetched to see their sojourn as a par- ticipation in the collective exodus from Hong Kong, especially given that their deviant sexuality may not find favor with the new regime. This read- ing will add to, rather than reduce, the film’s complexity, as Fai and Po- wing can be regarded at once as partly political refugees (though they have no recourse to seeking political asylum in such terms in their host country), partly sexual exiles, and partly tourists looking for a new locale to start their relationship over. As financial problems leave them stranded in Argentina, they assume new identities as illegal workers or even illegal immigrants (assuming their visas have expired), while simultaneously embodying their other diasporic identities delineated above.

In an examination of the material conditions that engender modes of travel, the issue of class inevitably surfaces on both the domestic and global levels. In his analysis of Happy Together, Tambling highlights the working-class background of the characters in contradistinction to the “thoroughly bourgeois” background in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (2003, 66). While this is accurate on a micro level within the confines of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the fact that these working-class characters can afford to travel to Argentina (notwithstanding Fai’s stealing of money from his boss)—and more important, that their travel is not borne out of an economic imperative to seek employment abroad—demands a reconfiguration of class status on a macro scale. That is, in a world where there are “first-world zones” in formerly “developing” countries and “third-world zones” in supposedly “first-world” nations (Braziel and Man- nur 2003, 11), the working-class background of the protagonists at home should not obscure their comparatively privileged material conditions, which make their travel to Argentina—a country unquestionably lower on the global economic order than Hong Kong or Taiwan—possible in the first place, while it throws into question the usefulness of a world sys- tems classification.

Therefore, diaspora and diasporic movement must be examined within the context of global capitalism (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 11). Tambling acknowledges that Happy Together responds to the power of globalization, as Taiwan has also been presented as “a place with an eco- nomic power Argentina lacks, for Taiwan has been exporting coach-loads of tourists to Buenos Aires” (2003, 63), where it is Fai’s job as a doorman at Bar Sur to welcome them. While Chang distinguishes himself from these package tourists, his reasons for leaving Taiwan (“Because I’m unhappy”) and for staying on in Argentina (“There’s no point returning

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when you haven’t thought things through”) betray a luxury of travel that stems from a spiritual need for self-exploration rather than material poverty. To say the very least, despite their working-class background, none of the three protagonists seem to be the breadwinners on whom their families depend financially back home, and despite having to work illegally in manual labor (with the exception of Po-wing) in the diasporic space, they have been able to save enough money not only for a home- bound air ticket, but also for a visit to their chosen “holiday destinations” in Argentina before returning home. The confidence that Fai has in know- ing where to locate Chang in the future, having visited the food stall run by Chang’s parents in Taipei, is a confidence grounded, however uncon- sciously, in a sense of financial security that would engender the expres- sion—even fruition perhaps—of his sexuality as “happy together.”

As stated from the outset, many discourses of travel and diaspora problematize the relationship between home and away, with earlier mod- els privileging “the geographical, political, cultural, and subjective spaces of the home-nation as the authentic space of belonging and civic partic- ipation, while devaluing and bastardizing the states of displacement or dislocation, rendering them inauthentic places of residence” (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 6). As Happy Together is one of the two films in this book (the other being The Wedding Banquet) whose diegeses are set outside of East Asia, its representation of diasporic sexualities travelling in Argen- tina cannot totally escape the problematic of home and away. As R. Radha- krishnan argues, “Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier ‘elsewhere’ in an active and critical relationship with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. ‘Home’ then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location” (1996, xiii–xiv).

In what follows, I will offer an analysis of Happy Together that focuses on the negotiation of travelling sexualities in the in-between space created as a site of tension between home and away. Delineating the relationship between Fai and Po-wing and that between Fai and Chang, I will show that the construction of sexualities vis-à-vis home and away is predicated on a set of opposing values and argue that the film’s deployment of the spatial construction of sexuality reinstates the idealization of home.

Domesticity, Monogamy, and Private Sex

In terms of the relationship between home and sexuality, Fai is associated with home, a longing for home, and a difficult relationship with his sexu-

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ality vis-à-vis the figure of his father back home, whereas Po-wing seem- ingly has no home or no need for home and flaunts his sexuality wherever he is. (The third character, the sexually ambiguous Chang, is travelling around but with the intention of going home and is thus more aligned with Fai.) It has been noted that definitions of home shift across a num- ber of registers: “home can mean where one usually lives, or it can mean where one’s family lives, or it can mean one’s native country” (Ahmed 2000, 86). The home away from home that Fai sets up in Argentina is where the drama of his relationship with Po-wing is usually played out, and this home can also be seen as Fai’s symbolic longing for his home in Hong Kong.

The film sets up a corollary of contrasting values between Fai and Po- wing. Financially, Fai is more prudent and holds regular jobs, whereas Po- wing does not work and lives off his sexual partners. Emotionally, Fai tends to bottle things up and is prone to alcoholism and violence, whereas Po-wing wears his moods on his sleeves and often imposes them on Fai. Sexually, Fai is faithful and seeks monogamy while Po-wing is promiscu- ous. Socially, Fai is a domestic creature who returns home immediately after work, whereas Po-Wing is a flâneur who feels claustrophobic at home and loves cruising in the streets. Taken together, these opposing traits can be grouped spatially and ideologically into home-as-private-sphere versus city-as-public-sphere. They are also embedded in a discourse of sex and sexuality as private, personal, and intimate set against the notion of pub- lic sex as anonymous, promiscuous, and impersonal.

The private space for the realization of a monogamous, stable, inti- mate relationship in Happy Together is the home away from home estab- lished by Fai. It is during the period of Po-wing’s recovery, when he is held captive in the confines of the home because of his injury, that, from Fai’s perspective, they are happiest together.10 Happy Together has a complex use of color scheme, alternating between full color and black and white, and the film uses both color scheme and music to denote the change in Fai’s emotional state before and after this period.11 The sequence at the start of the film, in which Fai and Po-wing first break up on their trip to the Iguazu Falls, is shot in black and white. This coloration is carried over to Buenos Aires, where, as a doorman at Bar Sur, Fai is shown to be impatient when taking photographs for a group of tourists (figure 4.3), chucking the cam- era in the tour guide’s hands with the words, “Fuck it,” as live tango music spills out from the bar. After he starts over with Po-wing following the lat- ter’s injury, the film switches into full-color mode. In a similar sequence, now shot in color, Fai is clearly in good spirits, smiling while patiently tak- ing photographs for a tour group (figure 4.4). Set to the extra-diegetic

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tune of Astor Piazzolla’s music Prologue (Tango apasionado), it signals, as the music’s title suggests, a new beginning for the couple.

Fai’s idea of “happy together” is rooted in domesticity, as Po-wing’s recovery period most resembles that of a monogamous marriage, with domestic details of cooking, eating, washing, sleeping, dancing, and end- less bickering. As Po-wing’s hands are bandaged, Fai plays the dual roles

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Figure 4.3. Fai in a foul mood after breaking up with Po-wing (shot in black and white). (Copyright Block 2 Pictures/Prémon H./Seowoo Film/Jet Tone Production, 1997)

Figure 4.4. Fai in a cheerful mood after making up with Po-wing (shot in color). (Copyright Block 2 Pictures/Prémon H./Seowoo Film/Jet Tone Production, 1997)

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of the responsible husband, who works and brings money home, and the dutiful wife, who feeds, cleans, and takes care of her partner. For Chow, this recovery period “may thus arguably be considered as the heart of the matter of Wong’s (ambivalent) portrayal of happiness” (1999, 39). This portrayal of happiness is ambivalent, I would argue, because it belies a desire for control. As Po-wing gradually recovers, Fai’s fear of losing con- trol over him also becomes increasingly palpable. On one occasion, Fai returns to an empty home and suspects that Po-wing has gone out cruis- ing. When Po-wing claims that he has merely gone to get cigarettes, the following scene shows Fai stocking up the room with cartons of cigarettes on the pretext of saving Po-wing the trouble of having to go out at night to get them. Seeing through Fai’s act as a power play, Po-wing sweeps the cigarettes onto the floor, and the couple subsequently has more fights and soon breaks up again.

As the only direct reference to the film’s title (besides the use of the eponymous song at the end of the film), Fai’s definition of “happy together ” deserves a closer analysis. The scene in which the definition comes is located at a time in the diegesis when Fai picks fights not only with Po-wing at home, but also with his colleagues at work during football games. While he earlier declined his colleagues’ invitation to play mahjong and retreated to the kitchen to study a map to plan a trip to the Iguazu Falls, he now disregards financial prudence and joins in the gambling. Fol- lowing the full-color shot of Fai playing mahjong, the film switches to black-and-white mode, depicting Fai in a reflective mood at home, accom- panied by this voice-over: “One thing I never told Ho Po-wing: actually I didn’t want him to recover so fast. The period when he was injured was the happiest time I had with him.” Alongside an earlier tango dance scene between the couple in the kitchen, this black-and-white sequence is the most tender in the film, as Fai lovingly studies the face of the sleeping Po- wing and softly caresses his eyebrow.

This sequence, however, can also be read as the cruellest. The next scene reverts to full color: a bored Fai plays with a knife, while Po-wing looks on then turns off his bedside lamp to go to sleep, leaving Fai sitting in the corner of the room, flipping the knife despondently. In a single cut the home has turned from one imbued with love to one threatened with violence. More important, the black-and-white sequence defining Fai’s notion of “happy together” is inserted into the full-color portion of the film. The black-and-white color scheme does not (only) serve the conven- tional function of signifying past events, but is also a register of Fai’s emo- tional state. Sandwiched between the mahjong scene, highlighting Fai’s loss of control over his financial prudence, and the knife-flipping scene,

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underscoring his impending loss of control over his violent tendency, the black-and-white sequence does not so much reflect Fai’s reminiscence of the happiest time he has with Po-wing as it reveals his desire to return to the period in which he has the most control over him. While Fai’s travel- ling sexuality yearns for a home away from home where a domestic, monogamous, and private relationship can reside, his desire for control remains the inextricable if not determining element in his definition of happiness.

Flânerie, Promiscuity, and Public Sex

In contrast to Fai’s spatialization of sex in the private sphere of the home, the film portrays Po-wing as an active participant in a gay subculture that values “sexual adventurism, experimentation, and variety” in the public sphere of the city (Chauncey 1996, 253). Like the flâneurs who leisurely stroll in the streets and arcades of Paris in the writings of Charles Baude- laire and Walter Benjamin, the “prowling homosexual” has been described as “the perverted flâneur” (Betsky 1997, 10), with the public toilet being one of the main sites for cruising for sex. In George Chauncey’s descrip- tion, Po-wing probably finds “the very anonymity, unpredictability, and danger of encounters in public places to be sexually exciting” (1996, 253), whereas Fai is “as likely as the anti-vice societies to regard such encoun- ters as shameful,” for he expects “the same level of romanticism, monog- amy, and commitment to be involved in gay relationships that bourgeois ideology expected of marriage” (ibid., 252). In Argentina, Po-wing’s sex- uality continues to travel from one partner to another, the diasporic space becoming his new sexual playground. Besides, unlike Fai, he has no hang- ups about home whatsoever.

The contrast between Fai and Po-wing’s attitudes towards sex and sexuality is aptly illustrated by the tango dance, which in Happy Together serves as a metaphor for the seductiveness of sex, if not for sex itself.12 Po- wing is, unsurprisingly, a master at the dance, whereas Fai is clumsy. Dur- ing his period of recovery Po-wing teaches Fai how to dance the tango, and the couple’s dancing scene in the communal kitchen is an embodi- ment of their being happy together. Crucially, while Fai has been rejecting Po-wing’s sexual advances during this period, in this scene it is Fai who ini- tiates a kiss, leading to more passionate kissing and groping between the two. The communal kitchen, usually bustling with tenants cooking and shouting, is emptied out to accommodate the intimacy between the cou- ple, its semipublic status underlining Fai’s rare open expression of his sexuality. When the couple breaks up on the trip to the Iguazu Falls, Fai

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realizes that Po-wing’s “Let’s start over” can have two meanings, which I understand as also meaning “Let’s end it.” Set to Piazzolla’s music Finale (Tango apasionado), the tango-dancing scene reminds us that as their rela- tionship has to end before it can start over in Buenos Aires, their newly started relationship is also destined, as hinted by the music’s title, to come to another end.

The two domains embodied by Fai and Po-Wing, however, are not mutually exclusive, as each can be the repressed desire of the other. In fact, Po-wing is “more desperately in need of the relationship than Fai is, although on the surface the opposite seems to be the case” (Stokes and Hoover 1999, 274–275). “Let’s start over” is a suggestion uttered only by Po-wing, and it is Po-wing who keeps contacting Fai in an attempt to make up with him in Buenos Aires after their break up at the start of the film. As Chow observes, “ironically, it is the unfaithful one, the one who is always leaving, who most frequently desires to ‘start over again’ and rebuild the broken home” (1999, 37). After Fai’s departure for the Iguazu Falls towards the end of the film, Po-wing moves into Fai’s apartment and “begins to scrub and clean the apartment’s floor in a manner that literally makes him resemble Fai” (ibid., 44).

Similarly, Fai is not unacquainted with the gay subculture of public sex or what Marc Siegel calls “ghetto knowledge”: the skills at negotiating “the unspoken codes and unformalizable gestures of a sexual ghetto” (2001, 284). For Fai, the two seemingly separate realms of sexual expres- sion collapse after the exit of both Po-wing and Chang from his life, lead- ing him to succumb to the allure of public sex. Following Chang’s depar- ture, the film features a montage of Fai mingling with men in the city streets, with a shot of a man’s bottom in denim jeans and another of drag queens waving from the rear of a car driving past, scored to the sexually suggestive lyrics of Frank Zappa’s song I Have Been in You. This is followed by a sequence in which Fai visits a public toilet, where he deliberately bumps into another man to test if he is interested in sex, and a gay porn cinema, where a man performs oral sex on him. For Chow, there is a kind of “superhuman agency” at the “metanarrative level of the film as a whole” that serves the following function:

In the case of the lovers, this superhuman agency lies precisely in its ability to yoke together—to render into one unity—entirely incompatible or incommen- surate universes (such as promiscuity and fidelity, flânerie and domesticity), so that what begins as difference eventually turns into sameness. By the end of the film, precisely the kinds of details that used to distinguish the two men— having casual sex with strangers and performing tedious domestic chores—

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have become instead the means of visually conflating them. Each man has, it seems, internalized the other to the point of changing places with each other. (1999, 44; emphasis in original)

While Chow’s description is accurate on one level, the film’s narrato- rial imperative emphasizes the couple’s differences rather their similari- ties. Because Fai chooses to define his sexuality against that of Po-wing, he “expresses discomfort and confusion about this [public] sexual world” (Siegel 2001, 286). In an earlier scene, as Po-wing quizzes Fai on his rela- tionship with Chang and teasingly asks if Fai has slept with the janitor at his lodging place, Fai retorts, “I’m not you.” Fai’s voice-over accompany- ing the public toilet scenes says, “Before I didn’t like cruising in public toi- lets as I thought it dirty. Still I occasionally go for its convenience. I didn’t expect to see Ho Po-wing there. Since then I’ve never been back. . . . I’ve always thought that I’m very different from Ho Po-wing. Turns out that in loneliness everyone is the same.” For Fai, seeing Po-wing at the same cruising space seems to present a crisis for his own sexuality, which is irreconcilable with that of Po-wing. Likewise, compared to Fai’s unwaver- ing wish for a monogamous relationship located in the private realm of the home, Po-wing’s repeated requests to start over highlight precisely his indecisive oscillation between togetherness and independence, as the lure of public sex in the city constantly draws this promiscuous flâneur away from the claustrophobic domestic space set up by Fai. In a film in which Fai mentions his wish to return to Hong Kong three times whereas Po- wing never expresses the same wish, their different attitudes towards going home embody their disparate travelling sexualities in Argentina.

Indeterminate Sexuality and the Anxiety of Heteronormativity

The introduction of a third character, Chang, in the second half of the film provides a contrast between the two kinds of (possible) relationships for Fai. As mentioned above, Chang is more aligned with Fai in relation to the issue of home. As in Fai’s case, there is no question about Chang’s intention to return home after his sojourn in Argentina. Just as Fai works the night shift at the abattoir to be back on Hong Kong time, Chang notes before leaving Argentina that it is evening in Taipei and wonders if the night market in Liaoning Street (where his parents operate a food stall) has started. Chang is thus united with Fai in time in two senses: their com- mon consciousness of another time zone that is home and the possibility of a future relationship.

From the outset, Chang shows an unusual interest in Fai and in Fai’s

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relationship with Po-wing. In his first appearance in the film, as Fai’s col- league at the Chinese restaurant, Chang is washing dishes while listening to the hustle and bustle in the kitchen with his eyes closed. (In a later scene, he reveals that he had suffered from an eye problem as a child, and though it has since been cured, he cannot get rid of the habit of relying more on his ears than his eyes.) He hears Fai on the phone asking Po-wing what he wants for dinner and comments, “This guy loves talking on the phone. I could hear that his tone is happy. The other party must be some- one he likes.” While it is unclear how much Chang understands of Fai’s conversation in Cantonese (the two usually conduct their conversation in a mix of Mandarin and Cantonese, with Chang showing adequate com- prehension of Cantonese to respond), it makes Chang’s interception of Fai’s telephone conversation with Po-wing on one occasion suspect, as if Chang, looking stealthily after Fai returns to the phone, is trying to find out who or what the gender of Fai’s mysterious partner is. This intercep- tion is, crucially, the trigger of one of the fiercest fights between Fai and Po-wing, leading Fai to throw Po-wing out of the apartment for the night. Thus Chang functions at once as a trigger to the beginning of another breakup between Fai and Po-wing and as a promise of a new relationship for Fai.

The film also designates Chang as an acute observer of Fai’s emotional state, especially as it fluctuates vis-à-vis Fai’s relationship with Po-wing. When Fai calls home to find that Po-wing is out, the film does not show much of Fai’s unhappy expression but instead cuts to Chang’s contempla- tive look, which serves as a thermometer both of Fai’s emotional state and of Chang’s affective investment in their affair. As Fai’s relationship with Po-wing deteriorates and he starts playing mahjong with his colleagues, Chang looks on through the window of the kitchen, clearly concerned. Moreover, Chang shows little interest in women, as he rejects the advances of a female colleague in Fai’s presence, claiming he prefers women with a deep and low voice, one that will make his heart beat quicker. When Chang proceeds to ask Fai what kind of woman’s voice Fai prefers, his motive for asking the question is as ambiguous as Fai’s answer, “It doesn’t matter as long as you like it.” While Chang might have been seeking con- firmation with regard to Fai’s sexuality, Fai’s ambiguous answer could be equally suggestive to Chang.

The film shows the ambiguity of their relationship as reciprocal. After drinking in the 3 Amigos bar together, Fai gets drunk and has to be escorted home by Chang. As Chang undresses Fai and puts him to bed, there is a close-up of Fai’s head facing the wall but with his eyes open, lis- tening to Chang tidying up as if waiting for Chang to make a move on

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him. In the next sequence, in which they have a football game with col- leagues, Chang is shown grabbing Fai from behind several times, the sequence ending with a pan to Fai looking at the distant Chang, as if con- templating the nature of their relationship. As they embrace before Chang leaves for his trip to Ushuaia, Fai’s voice-over incorporates Chang’s lover’s discourse: “I cannot hear anything but my own heartbeat. I wonder if he hears it too.” Chang has put the heartbeat back in Fai’s life and offers Fai hope of a possible relationship.

For Fai, Chang and Po-wing could not have been more different. Where Po-wing is self-aggrandizing and self-centred, Chang is caring and sensitive. Po-wing enters and exits Fai’s life according to his whims and fancies, with little regard for Fai’s feelings. When Fai falls ill with a high fever during Po-wing’s period of recovery, Po-wing nonetheless asks Fai to cook for him since his own hands are bandaged. By contrast, Chang is a good listener who provides Fai with stable companionship. Leaving for travel and sensing that Fai is unhappy, Chang offers to bring Fai’s troubles in his cassette recorder to the lighthouse at Ushuaia, supposedly a place where one’s unhappiness can be discarded. Rather than playing the role of caretaker to the unpredictable Po-wing, with Chang, for once, “Fai, too, can feel he is being taken care of ” (Chow 1999, 41).

In a film driven by the desire to “start over” and to be “happy together,” the motivation behind Chang’s travel and the nature of his rela- tionship with Fai become significant but prove elusive. Chang has said he is travelling because he is unhappy in Taiwan and there is no point in returning before he has thought things through. What is he unhappy about, and what does he have to think through? One suggestion is his sex- uality, which remains ambiguous in the film. For Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, Chang’s problems “remain unspecified. Perhaps he’s dealing with his sexual identity; perhaps not” (1999, 272). In a review of the film, Charlotte O’Sullivan sees Chang as being “on the brink of sex- ual awareness” (1998, 49). On the other hand, drawing upon Alan Sin- field’s notion of “post-gay” understandings of relationships and Marjorie Garber’s distinction between eroticism and sexuality, Helen Leung sug- gests that the film’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the relationship between Chang and Fai “jettisons the idea that all relational bonds can be clearly demar- cated as either sexual or platonic, and that people can be categorized as either straight or gay, according to their sexual preference” (2001, 438; emphasis in original). Tambling makes a similar observation that in Happy Together “no one makes any identity claim at all and the most interesting relationship is between two men who make no avowal of an identity to each other at all.” For Tambling, whether Chang has any sexual interest

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in Fai “cannot be articulated for the reason that Chang seems to have escaped the necessity of defining himself in straight/gay terms at all” (2003, 74).

While the former group of readings focuses on Chang’s emerging but undefined sexuality, the latter group celebrates this indeterminacy of sex- ual identities. This indeterminacy, I would argue, is not necessarily a “third way,” offered by the film as a more fluid form of sexuality in contrast to the ones embodied by Fai and Po-wing. Rather, it serves as a promise of “happy together” for Fai as, in its representation of the different kinds of travelling sexualities, the film privileges one over the other. Towards the end of the film, as the digital clock turns from 23:59 to 00:00 in the apart- ment from which Fai has moved out, Po-wing is shown moving in, repair- ing the faulty revolving mechanism of the lamp with the picture of the Iguazu Falls that first inspired their trip and crying uncontrollably. The film then cuts to the Iguazu Falls, where Fai has finally arrived, with his voice-over lamenting Po-wing’s absence. As the temporal marker signals a starting over, it is clear that Po-wing, stranded in Argentina, is drowned in sorrow, whereas Fai is due to return to Hong Kong and his unhappiness is, in an immediate following sequence, disposed of “at the end of the world” by Chang, who also arrives at his travel destination before return- ing to Taiwan. The impending return home by two out of the three pro- tagonists thus appears to privilege the space of the home-nation, as in many discourses on travel and diaspora.

In the film, narrated chiefly from Fai’s perspective through his voice- over, and with Chang also enjoying a voice-over but not Po-wing (Tam- bling 2003, 40), Fai’s sexual economy and his potential relationship with Chang are indeed the driving forces. Three features unite Fai and Chang against Po-wing: similar work ethics, arrival at their respective travel des- tinations, and return home. In terms of work ethics, Fai and Chang are colleagues who work regular hours in a kitchen, whereas Po-wing lives off his sexual partners. As for travel destinations, Fai finally makes it to the Iguazu Falls but without Po-wing, while Chang arrives at the lighthouse at Ushuaia. With regard to home, both Fai and Chang manage to save enough money to return home, whereas Po-wing is left behind in Argen- tina. The film’s designation of the three characters’ final fate clearly favors domesticity over flânerie, monogamy over promiscuity, and private sexu- ality over public sexual activity. For Yue, the film’s didactic treatment of the characters “exposes the straight-laced moral discourse of the narra- tive: excess of any nature is not tolerated.” She further argues: “From the construction of the three male protagonists, it can be concluded that both Yiu-Fai and Chang are ‘rewarded’ in their quests through the neo-Confu-

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cian ‘values’ of decent hard work, thrift and normativity. The film’s plot succeeds for both of them: they both reach their respective destinations. In the course of such a resolution, it appears that Wong [Kar-wai] has undermined the performative thrust of the film. The ‘gay’ theme appears to be contained by restraining Bao-Wing’s [Po-wing] decadent excess” (2000, 255).

Yue’s argument can be understood in the context of a dominant dis- course in lesbian and gay studies and in queer theory that challenges heteronormativity. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner situate the trans- formation in the cultural forms of intimacy in the history of the modern public sphere and the modern discourse of sexuality as a fundamental human capacity. They argue that both Habermas and Foucault “point to the way a hegemonic public has founded itself by a privatization of sex and the sexualization of private personhood.” Both identify the conditions in which “sexuality seems like a property of subjectivity rather than a pub- licly or counterpublicly accessible culture” (1998, 559). By making sex pri- vate and personal, Berlant and Warner claim, heteronormative conven- tions of intimacy have blocked the building of non-normative or explicit public sexual cultures (ibid., 553). The stigmatization of public sex and promiscuity is therefore inseparable from the dichotomy of public/pri- vate and the demarcation of sex as personal and intimate.

Public sex as a means of challenging heteronormativity is a theme picked up by Marc Siegel in his analysis of the film, in which he focuses his attention on “the ghetto as the context within which the behaviors, spaces, and images in the film become meaningful.” For Siegel, intimacy in Happy Together resides neither within coupledom nor in the private space of the apartment. Instead, the potential for intimacy exists outside the home, in the public sexual world (2001, 285). This leads him to con- clude that Happy Together shares with Wong’s other films “a concerted refusal to relegate intimacy to the private form of the couple or to the pri- vatized space of the apartment” and that Wong’s films “picture the limits of heteronormative constraints on intimacy” and “challenge the idea that intimacy can be confirmed within the form of the couple and within the realm of the private” (ibid., 286). I would argue, however, that to focus, as Siegel does, on the public sexual activities as “creative of potential new intimacies” (ibid., 285) betrays perhaps the critic’s wish fulfilment, as it disregards the marginalization, not to mention stigmatization, of the sex- ual world embodied by Po-wing, who literally has no voice(over) in the film’s narrative. Moreover, Fai’s public sexual adventurism towards the end of the film is marked by a sense of abjection and contained by a patri- archal order located in the space of the home-nation.

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Taking a different position and acknowledging the film’s portrayal of happiness as ambiguous, Chow notes that this portrayal is “from the per- spective of the faithful partner, the one who is repeatedly betrayed and stuck at home, and who is, moreover, forced to assume the maternal role of caretaker when the promiscuous partner comes stumbling back” (1999, 39). Unlike Yue’s and Siegel’s celebration of Po-wing’s gay performativity and ghetto knowledge, Chow describes him as “an irresponsible scumbag” and a “jerk, who fucks around, and comes and goes as he pleases” (ibid., 36, 40). Instead, Chow defends Fai’s act of confiscating Po-wing’s passport as “of course by no means a reasonable or even practical move, yet its mad- ness also embodies a kind of groping, a desperate attempt to be construc- tive in the midst of a destructive relationship” (ibid., 40). However, as the passport is the ultimate symbol of the freedom of mobility and travel, and given their diasporic identities, Fai’s repeated refusal to return Po-wing’s passport belies a deeper desire for domination and control. Rather than seeing the film as communicating “a compelling message about love in all its ambiguities” (ibid.), I would argue that Fai’s desperate attempt to be constructive cannot mask a stifling possessiveness that in itself can be destructive in its desire for faithfulness.

If the two sexualities embodied by Fai and Po-wing are somehow rep- resented as irreconcilable, we must question not only why the film privi- leges one over the other, but also why critics have chosen to either affirm or challenge the film’s construction. As the Clifford quote asks at the start of the chapter, what kinds of knowledges and theories about travelling sexualities do these readings of the film produce, or indeed reproduce? This poses serious questions, which extend beyond the discussion of the film per se but which in fact form the unspoken premise upon which the above readings have been made possible. They concern the practice (and politics) of contemporary academic discourse in relation to lesbian, gay, and queer identity politics. As noted above, arguments such as Yue’s, which challenge heteronormativity and celebrate gay performativity, have been the dominant discourse in the fields of lesbian and gay studies. In a book concerned with the representation of male homosexuality in con- temporary Chinese cinemas, would it be possible to question the basis of this challenge to heteronormativity and ask at what price gay performa- tivity is enacted?

In a different context but illuminating in an analogous manner, Fran Martin cautions us of “the trap of casting a particular culture and a par- ticular history as the paradigmatic, illustrative example of the abstract quality that is currently privileged in academic discourse.” She goes on to argue as follows:

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Given that “cultural hybridity” appears to constitute for the current genera- tion of scholars the object of collective desire that “cultural tradition” was for a previous one, it would be all too easy merely to celebrate Taiwan’s palpable syncretic cultures as though their hybridity were itself proof against the con- tinuing effects of unevenly held power. . . . One might ask: Which people in Tai- wan, specifically, experience “in-between-ness” as productive or liberating? And for whom does it constitute, on the contrary, an unlivable condition? (2003c, 35–36; emphasis in original)

Similarly, we might ask: Who benefits from a discourse that challenges heteronormativity and that constructs gay performativity as homonor- mativity? Who is excluded as a result? Following lesbian and gay studies’ self-definition against the heterosexual norm of coupledom symbolized by domesticity, monogamy, and private sex, expressions such as flânerie, promiscuity, and public sex become valorized to the extent that to suggest the contrary would almost immediately invite accusations of homopho- bia and the aping of heteronormativity, while the assumption behind the former’s politics often goes unquestioned. Despite queer theory’s empha- sis on performativity, of which fluidity and (gender) border-crossing are its hallmarks, the kind of discursive practice and identity politics arising from this collective desire to define itself against heteronormativity has paradoxically solidified into a paradigmatic—and arguably hegemonic— discourse that precludes the possibilities of other forms of sexual intima- cies, especially forms that bear similarities with those of the heterosexual counterpart.13 That is, as flânerie, promiscuity, and public sex are invariably constructed as homonormative, domesticity, monogamy, and private sex thus defy imagination as possibly equally homonormative, since the two are supposedly mutually exclusive. Heteronormativity-as-homonorma- tivity then becomes the Great Unthinkable, the ultimate taboo in hege- monic, liberationist discourses within lesbian, gay, and queer studies.

Returning to our discussion of Happy Together, we may wonder, for example, why gay performativity has to be inextricably linked to “excess” and opposed to the “neo-Confucian ‘values’ of decent hard work, thrift and normativity.” Is a hard-working, thrifty, (hetero)normal gay unthink- able—or unacceptable—and to whom? In a politics that valorizes the transgressive, would it not be plausible to regard Fai’s seemingly banal pursuit of a domestic, monogamous, private relationship as radical rather than a scandal? Conversely, what is so non-(hetero)normative about sex- ual promiscuity and excess?14 If sexualities do indeed travel, it is literally Po-wing’s flâneur-like travel from one sexual partner to another and his

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refusal to “settle down”—that is, to be “fixed”—that are privileged in Yue’s reading, as she objects to “the fixity of the neo-Confucian fetish of the hardworking ‘Asian’ stereotype constructed through Yiu-Fai and Chang” that the film enables (2000, 256). In her writing on narratives of migration and estrangement, Sara Ahmed argues against Rosi Braidotti’s valoriza- tion of the nomad as “a figuration for the kind of subject who has relin- quished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” and of a nomadic con- sciousness as “an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries” and “the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.” Instead, Ahmed asks, “We might consider how the very theoretical approach which privileges ‘transgression’ and ‘subversion’ and a lack of fixity does not necessarily define itself simply against the law, convention and boundaries, but may actually serve to reconstitute the law, conventions, and boundaries: we can ask, how does the desire to go beyond fixity serve to fix? How does the law require transgression in order to exist?” (2000, 84; emphasis mine)

Ahmed’s challenging question acutely highlights the blind spot of theoretical approaches that appear to be progressive in their emphasis on transgression and subversion but are in fact also hostile and dogmatic towards those who may choose to be fixed and not to travel. I am not sug- gesting that the film’s privileging of Fai’s form of travelling sexuality— which, unlike Po-wing’s, is driven by a fixation to establish a home as well as to return home—is necessarily beyond reproach. What I am arguing is that despite the conventional—and some might say conservative—form Fai’s sexual economy takes, it cannot be dismissed outright as illegitimate or inauthentic. A truly inclusive and progressive politics cannot be built upon an immunity from any challenge to its own logic, and a radical the- oretical approach such as queer theory might have to acknowledge that heteronormativity-as-homonormativity is equally performative in its dis- cursive sense of being constitutive for certain agents.

Let’s Start Over: Homecoming as Non-Arrival

If Fai’s travelling sexuality is going to finally take him home, it is worth highlighting the only time when Hong Kong appears in the film. Sand- wiched between the two abattoir sequences, the Hong Kong cityscape is shot upside down as Fai wonders what Hong Kong might look like from Argentina, having just discovered that the two locales are antipodal. It is clear at this point in the diegesis that Fai has decided to return to Hong Kong as he starts a new job at the abattoir to earn more money, and the night shift means he will be in sync with Hong Kong time. The upside-

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down shots of Hong Kong begin with a brief night scene, followed by a longer day scene, both shot from a vehicle travelling on busy roads, cap- turing overpasses crisscrossing and skyscrapers towering above (or rather below). The scenes are accompanied by low-volume radio broadcasts, which feature a call-in program, an announcement about typhoons, and a news item on a car theft. The disembodied voices on the radio and the upside-down shots of Hong Kong’s cityscape, I would argue, do not evoke a sense of nostalgia and longing for home; rather, they serve to disorien- tate and defamiliarize Hong Kong and even, by their inversion, subvert (as it is, from below) Hong Kong to the point of no return. From Argentina, the images of Hong Kong conjured up by Fai are images of discomfort, underscored by the ominous messages in the disembodied voices.

The travelling shots of Hong Kong prefigure the closing scenes of the film, in which Fai rides on the Taipei mass rapid transport train. Just before the closing scenes, Chang had hoped to say goodbye to Fai before return- ing to Taiwan but could not find him in Buenos Aires. Fai, on the other hand, transits at Taipei on his return journey to Hong Kong and visits Liaoning Street in search of Chang. Removing Chang’s photograph (taken at Ushuaia) from the parents’ food stall, Fai feels assured that though he does not know when he will see Chang again, he now knows where he can find him. In contrast to the sombre Hong Kong scenes, the closing travel- ling Taipei night scenes are engulfed by bright neon lights on both sides of the train track, with the camera time speeded up to match the upbeat rendition of the Turtles’ 1960s hit song Happy Together, by Danny Chung. With the line “I can see me loving nobody but you for all my life” played at high volume, the film signals a beginning rather than an end. As David Martinez comments on the use of music in Wong’s films, “Music speaks just as evocatively as pictures, and in fact always has the last word. All Wong Kar-wai’s films have one thing in common: they all end on a song which, from Days of Being Wild onwards, has always opened up the per- spective of a fresh departure, a new story just beginning, for once giving the lie to the fateful title, ‘The End’” (1997, 35; emphasis in original).15

With a faintly detectable smile on Fai’s face, the cinematographer Christopher Doyle notes that this “looks like having the happiest ending of any WKW [Wong Kar-wai] film” (1998, 181). However, the referent in the title, Happy Together, is not what is shown in the film, for the relation- ship between Fai and Po-wing is anything but happy. Rather it points to what is not shown in the film: the relationship between Fai and Chang, extending beyond the scope of the film and remaining only a possibility. “Happy together” is therefore doubly absent in the film, as in Matthew

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Arnold’s lines in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead./The other powerless to be born” (1998, 81). Notwithstanding the upbeat music, could the ending not betray a deeper melancholia because the promise of “happy together” is deferred to the future, and the future—including Hong Kong’s future—remains unknown?

I believe it is significant that Fai’s homecoming results in his non- arrival at Hong Kong, and for this purpose, I would like to revisit a moment in Argentina when Fai decides on another form of homecoming, which is his attempt at reconciliation with his father. It has been noted that the absent father is a recurrent theme in Wong’s films (Lalanne 1997, 22). In Happy Together, the absent father in the distant home of Hong Kong haunts Fai’s existence in Argentina, creating an in-between space that interfaces Fai’s negotiation of his sexuality. Before leaving Hong Kong, Fai has stolen some money from his boss, who is a good friend of his father. In Argentina, Fai has worked hard to save up in the hope of repaying the stolen money. However, it seems to me that Fai’s feeling of guilt towards his father extends beyond this breach of trust, that Fai prob- ably regards his homosexuality as a greater form of betrayal to his father and as something that, not unlike his theft, demands an apology. Follow- ing Fai’s visit to the gay porn cinema, the film cuts to an exterior scene where Fai contemplates whether to call home in front of a public phone. His voice-over recounts his theft of the boss’s money and expresses his wish to apologize to his father. When he finally picks up the phone to make the call, we hear him say, “Hello, Pa. It’s Fai,” but there seems to be no response at the other end. While in this scene Fai is wearing different clothes from the gay porn cinema scene, indicating that the two scenes are temporally distinct, the film suggests a (causal) relation between the two by editing them in immediate sequence. As if Fai is seeking the approval of his father for his public sexual activity, this phone call simul- taneously reinscribes the patriarchal order in the film while cancelling out Fai’s sexual adventurism.

If Po-wing’s carefree loitering is “forever structured by a parasitical dependency on the other’s seeming stability, conventionality, and homeli- ness—hence his pathological compulsion constantly to ‘start over again’” (Chow 1999, 42)—Fai’s own sexual loitering must be seen in relation to his father, whose trust Fai has betrayed. That is, what Po-wing is to Fai is precisely what Fai is to his father: the unfaithful one. For Fai, going home entails reconciliation with his father on the dual issues of money and sex- uality.16 Po-wing, on the other hand, has no such financial burden or sex-

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ual baggage. In fact, it is he who has squandered Fai’s savings, resulting in their being stranded in Argentina. Fai’s desire to establish a home in Argen- tina and to return to Hong Kong can be understood as (over)compensa- tion for his infidelity to his father. His idealization of domesticity, monog- amy, and private sex is governed by a patriarchal order located in Hong Kong. The opposing values embodied by Fai and Po-wing, delineated above, are not so much between Po-wing and Fai as between Po-wing and Fai’s father.

Moreover, Fai’s desire for reconciliation with his father borders on the incestuous. After the phone call, Fai sets out to write his father a Christ- mas card that turns into a long letter. In addition to saying he is sorry, Fai also “tells his father many things he [the father] has always wanted to know but has never dared ask,” presumably a reference to Fai’s homosexuality. Fai ends the letter by hoping that his father will treat him as a friend and that he will let Fai “start over again.” By mobilizing the lover’s discourse between Po-wing and himself to plead for a chance to start over with his father, Fai not only takes on Po-wing’s persona of the unfaithful one, but also overlays his relationship with his father with an incestuous tone. As Fai posts the letter before the film cuts to the abattoir sequence, Zappa’s song, I Have Been in You, appears for the second time and interfaces the two with its unabashedly explicit lines: “I have been in you, baby, you have been in me. And we have been so intimately entwined, and it sure was fine.” When we recall that Zappa’s song accompanies Fai’s cruising scenes in its earlier appearance, does this betray, on a symbolic level, Fai’s desire to penetrate or be penetrated by his father, or does it merely suggest the biological relationship between the father and son since it is the father’s semen that has brought about the son’s existence and is thus, in a sense, forever “in him”? Insofar as Fai’s need for his father’s acceptance of his homosexuality reinstates the patriarchal order in the film, it also suggests that his desire for home may after all not be directed at Po-wing but at his own father.

However, the film’s ending in Taipei, which shores up Fai’s home- coming as non-arrival, I would argue, serves to frustrate the patriarchal order governing Fai’s negotiation of his sexuality. Towards the end of the film, having seen Chang’s parents in Taipei, Fai suddenly understands why Chang can be so happy travelling around the world: at least he has a place to which to return. His voice-over then wonders what will happen when he meets his father and concludes, “We’ll see.” The final shot of the film shows the mass rapid transport train heading towards the blinding white light of a station at high speed and suddenly coming to a halt. The film

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suggests that having travelled half way around the world to Argentina, Fai might have chosen a different destination to call home, thus rejecting rec- onciliation with the patriarchal order. Read metaphorically in geopolitical terms, the film offers travelling denizens of Hong Kong a choice away from the reunion with China. However ironic the film’s title might have been intended to be, the promise of “happy together” cannot be anchored in any particular location but is a journey on which travelling sexualities embark, then perhaps detour and never make their way home.

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