by Edna Wan
edited by Gina Fung
Wong Kar-wai, touted as one of Hong Kong’s premier filmmakers, sat down with Han Ong for an interview in 1998, a couple months after the release of Wong’s Happy Together (1997). In the interview, Wong remarks that with Happy Together, he “didn’t want to make a film about Hong Kong in 1997.”[i] Though, somehow after filming Happy Together, Wong “knew that [the film] was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong.”[ii] Here, Wong prefaces discussion of Happy Together by distancing the film from the geopolitical history in which it was produced. By claiming that he did not want to make a film “about Hong Kong in 1997,” Wong references the end of British control of Hong Kong in 1997, the watershed year that marked the city’s transfer of sovereignty. Similarly, Jonah Jeng writes in “No-Home Movie: Emotional Dislocation in ‘Happy Together’ and ‘Moonlight,’” that the film premiered on May 17, 1997, “less than two months before the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China […].”[iii]Across the Pacific, a similar desire to locate the film with the impending Handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China is echoed in an article published by the South China Morning Post. Indeed, the article by Edmund Lee begins, “released in Hong Kong cinemas on May 30, 1997, just before the Handover […].”[iv] With such reception, it seems almost impossible to divorce Happy Together from Hong Kong as a site of origin. Wong’s Happy Together features the turbulent and frenetic romance between Ho Po-wing and Lai Yu-fai as they move to Argentina as a remedy to their failing relationship.
Ninety-nine years prior to the release of Wong’s Happy Together, in 1898, Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon peninsula, and the New Territories were ceded to Great Britain conditionally as a colony. In fact, beginning in 1898, Hong Kong would belong to British Empire under the legislative mandate of a lease for ninety-nine years. With the expiration of the lease, on June 30th, 1997, the transfer of Hong Kong marked the return of the islands to the People’s Republic of China rendering it the administrative region which stands today. Such a politically tumultuous event became an emblem of conflict which then unfurled into garrisons of indignity for many Hong Kong people. Not only an emblem of conflict, the 1997 Handover also became a tale of lives interrupted by the end of British rule. Cultural output from Hong Kong during this period became calibrated by 1997, and popular reception of Wong’s films similarly peddled allegories of the city’s Handover. Wong’s films, Happy Together and Days of Being Wild, which are lifting the burden of reconciling national alliances, are not simply allegorical tales of the Handover, but productive explorations of structures of love, desire, and kinship.
Corollary to such popular reception of Happy Together, Wong’s second film Days of Being Wild – cushioned by the comfort of seven years before the impending Handover – similarly tethers Wong’s film to Hong Kong’s colonial history. Andrew Chan,in a review for Slant Magazine, writes that the film weaves emotion from the two golden eras in Hong Kong’s social and popular culture. “The first of these eras provides the setting – the Sixties,” Chan explains, “which Hong Kongers remember as a pivotal moment just a decade after immigrants from Communist China set off a population boom.”[v] Despite contextualizing Days of Being Wild with Hong Kong’s history, Chan mirrors some of Wong’s later sentiments about not wanting to make a film that testifies to Hong Kong’s impending Handover. Chan characterizes Wong’s film as not “interested in inundating us with period detail or social observation, the spaces are more spectral than physical, less lived-in than wafted through.”[vi] This short overview of the popular reception of Wong’s films reveals the ways in which both Happy Together and Days of Being Wild seem to negotiate space by situating Hong Kong as both the nucleus and the backdrop of his films.
Such tendencies to ground Wong’s films in Hong Kong’s geopolitical history finds its perfect application with literary critic Frederic Jameson’s theory of national allegory. For Jameson, national allegory is a necessary framework to analyze “Third World Literature.” As Rosalind Galt notes in Queer Cinema in the World, “allegory [for Jameson] is necessary to represent the real conditions of the postcolonial nation, since the legacy of colonial oppression alongside the pressures of neo-imperialism do not permit the forms of realist or modernist narratives favoured in Western modernity.”[vii] Putting pressure on the ideal of transparent exposure of “the real conditions of the postcolonial nation,” Galt perhaps more importantly heralds over Jameson’s theory of national allegory, the criticisms levelled at Jameson for reading all Third World narratives as national allegory. As Galt so acutely and attentively observes, “Jameson’s totalizing sweep is itself a colonizing gesture, limiting the complexity of non-Western textuality.”[viii] Privileging the politics and history of the nation-state over the text itself often pigeon-holes ‘Third World’ narratives while simultaneously valuing texts by their potential to be deciphered as allegory. Such allegorical reading necessarily commissions metaphor as the chief textual device which force narratives as substitutes and symbols of nation. In honouring a film’s engagement with space and national belonging above other narrative and thematic arcs, the work of national allegory is, as Galt argues, “limiting [to] the complexity of non-Western textuality.”[ix] In Happy Together, ‘Third World’ queer narratives and narratives of kindship are then elided for testaments of national struggle as reviewers continually and unrelentingly situate the film with the 1997 Handover.
Rejecting Jameson’s overemphasis on the nation can make room to explore the ways in which love, desire, and belonging are commensurate narrative forces that give structure to Wong’s films. By examining travel and movement through and beyond national borders in Happy Together and Days of Being Wild, Wong’s efforts to refuse geopolitical readings of his films can be located by analyzing how structures of kinship are interwoven with conceptions of space. In yoking kinship with space, Wong’s films foreclose the impulse towards Jameson’s national allegory by resisting the ongoing privileging of spatial narratives over structures of kinship. Neutralizing queer relationships in favor of (hetero)normative projects like nationalism, Jameson’s “totalizing sweep,” is not only, as Galt writes, a “colonizing gesture.” Importantly, national allegory is simultaneously a gesture of queer violence by failing to acknowledge Wong’s queer narratives.
Working against the efforts of national allegory, David Eng observes in The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, in Happy Together, “Lai and Ho depart for Argentina not just as an attempt to ‘start over’ their flagging relationship. They also leave Hong Kong because Lai has stolen money from his father’s business associate.”[x] Weaving together love, family, belonging, and financial responsibility – each in equal measure – Happy Together blurs the boundaries of each to unite transnational journeys with structures of kinship. Using love as framing and shaping forces that defines the contours of Po-wing and Yu-fai’s movement throughout Happy Together, Po-wing’s refrain “let’s start over” is an important site that positions desire as the force that motivates the couple’s movements throughout the film while also positioning desire as that which defines their relationship more broadly.
From the beginning of Happy Together, Wong couches movement and travel as central to Yu-fai and Po-wing’s relationship. The movie opens with a close-up shot of flipping passports that close in on the faces of the two male leads. Although this scene is short, passing in a flash, and less than ten seconds long, brevity is not made synonymous with inconsequentiality. This short scene is characterized by Lai Yu-fai and Ho Po-wing’s passports being flipped so rapidly that it appears on screen as a visual overstimulation of continual motion. Here, the passports themselves are the physical and material symbols of movement and travel, the vehicles that grant access across nations. As the rapid flipping of each page of the passports amplifies movement as a framing structure of the whole film, this short scene itself propels Wong’s film forward. The flipping passports pause when the customs officer stops to stamp the passports, momentarily lingering on the faces of Yu-fai and Po-wing. The flipping also stops when the customs officer points to Yu-fai’s travel status as “overseas.” Gesturing to the protagonists’ “overseas” status, Wong foregrounds the film’s preoccupation with national belonging.
At the same time, by positioning Yu-fai and Po-wing’s passports together, Wong also positions the two characters relationally and in adjacency, to foreground Yu-fai and Po-wing’s relationship in the film. After the passports are stamped, the scene ends, and the screen is engulfed again by a black screen with white text that reveals the title of the film. In bookending the scene with text, Wong creates a short vignette that serves to introduce the film, while shaping the way we perceive movement as central to Yu-fai and Po-wing’s identities.
While the vignette showcasing flipping passports serves as a visual introduction to Happy Together, the spoken dialogue between Po-wing and Yu-fai offers an aural introduction to the film. As the screen displaying the Chinese title of Wong’s film “春光乍泄” dissolves and the film begins, we hear Po-wing say, “Lai yu-fai, let’s start over.” However, the English translation of Po-wing’s speech misses the nuances that are captured in the Cantonese. In Cantonese, Po-wing actually says something closer to the English: “Lai Yu-fai how about we start over.” This is an important distinction because, in contrast to the English translation, which definitively marks Po-wing’s spoken refrain in the imperative form, the Cantonese “how about we start over” allows for, and is open to, his partner’s response. Understanding Po-wing’s refrain not as a statement as the English translation suggests, but rather as a question and an open invitation for response is central to revising the way in which we understand structures of belonging and kinship in Happy Together. Instead, the Cantonese refrain “how about we start over” offers and affords Yu-fai the agency to choose Po-wing, and an occasion to “start over” by choosing to leave Hong Kong with him.
In the scene that follows, we hear Yu-fai’s past-tense narration.He begins: “Ho Po-wing always says, ‘Let’s start over,” and it gets to me every time. We’ve been together for a while, and we break up often, but whenever he says, ‘Let’s start over,” I find myself back with him. In order to start over, we left Hong Kong.” Yu-fai admits that he “find[s] himself back with him” whenever Po-wing says ““Let’s start over.” Without disclosing why or how he finds himself back with Po-wing, Yu-fai absolves himself from any control in their relationship; it is as if he returns to Po-wing by accident, or as if their relationship is the achievement of destiny. However, by replacing “Let’s start over” with the more accurate “how about we start over,” Yu-fai does not only “find [him]self back with” Po-wing. Instead, he chooses to be with Po-wing and, by extension, chooses to “leave Hong Kong” with Po-wing.
As love and desire drive the couple to Argentina, it is also love and desire that act as obstacles in travel and in their pursuit of “start[ing] over.” The second time “starting over” is mentioned in the film, the couple has broken up. Again, Yu-fai retrospectively narrates, “when we first got here, we had no idea where to go. Then Po-wing bought a lamp and I really liked it. We asked a lot of people and found it was at Iguazu. We planned to see it and then go home, but we lost our way.” For Yu-fai and Po-wing, “[losing] [their] way” catalyzes their next break-up. The ambiguity disclosed with the ending “but we lost our way” at once marks their literal failure to find the Iguazu Falls, while also marking their rapidly unfastening relationship. This ambiguity interweaves movement and love in one broad stroke. Yu-fai says, “I never did find out where we were that day. I just remember he said it’s boring to be with me, that we should take a break. And perhaps, if we see each other again, we can start over.” Employing the conjunctive “and perhaps,” to link “see[ing] each other again” with “start[ing] over,” Yu-fai making “starting over” contingent on place. For Yu-fai, “starting over” their relationship is only possible if the two leave each other and “see each other again.”
Fig. 1. Watercolour painting of a lamp of Iguazu Falls in Argentina. In the opening scene of Happy Together, Po-wing first says “let’s start over” as Yiu-fai gazes at this lamp on their nightstand cluttered with polaroids and cigarettes. The lamp, a symbol related to the couple’s idealized romance, quite literally illuminates their goals in the future. Artwork by Tiffany Dai.
As Eng so perceptively analyzes in The Feeling of Kinship, the Cantonese colloquialism to “start over” translates literally to “from the head over again.”[xi] Eng examines this corporeal metaphor and suggests that it signifies an image at once psychic and physical. Embedded into the physical metaphor of “starting over” is an undeniable, and perhaps even incommensurable tension. Physically starting over “signifies a literal return, a going back to the beginning, a return to the starting line. But it also simultaneously marks an ostensible departure, a willful attempt to move forward in a new manner that would bring one to another place or effect without outcome or relation.”[xii] Eng’s deployment of the language of choice and agency here with “a willful attempt to move forward” captures the centrality of choice that is central to Po-wing’s “how about we start over.” Etymologically, “willful” comes from the Old English willan or wyllan, which means “to wish, desire.” By locating desire in the corporeal metaphor of “starting over,” Eng is attentive to the undeniable presence of choice that Po-wing’s “how about we start over” encourages. As such, the fate of Po-wing and Yu-fai’s relationship does not lie with whether or not they decide to make “a return” or a “departure” from one another. Instead, the significance of this metaphor lies in its ability to make room for structures of kindship and love as active “wish[es]” and “desire[s]” through which both characters decide to move through the world and towards (or away from) each other.
To conclude his narration, Lai Yu-fai says, “but for Ho Po-wing, ‘starting over’ means different things to him.” As the narration fades away, only sounds of driving cars in the background remain. In this concluding scene of Happy Together, the highway is so expansive scene that it almost consumes Po-wing and Yu-fai into its structure. The black and white hues in this scene render the couple indistinguishable from the highway while also reasserting the centrality of movement and journey in Po-wing and Yu-fai’s relationship. As the camera remains still to capture the moving vehicles, the scene begins with the couple standing next to each other on the side of the street. Importantly, the highway in this scene moves in both directions – mirroring the binary of “a return” and “a departure” that the metaphor of “starting over” produces. Yu-fai and Po-wing continue to stand on the side of the highway while cars and trucks pass them. Soon after, Po-wing tries to hitch-hike. He tries to choose a direction, though to no avail. Leaving Po-wing behind him to hitch-hike by himself, Yu-fai is the first one to walk away. Though it is not clear which direction he is walking in, Yu-fai has made a choice, and that choice is to leave Po-wing.
Returning to Wong Kar-wai’s response to Han Ong as he made public the relationship he intended between Happy Together and Hong Kong, he offers, “I knew that it was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong.” By marking the film’s “relat[ion]” to Hong Kong, Wong also reveals that Po-wing and Yu-fai’s relationship in Happy Together is inextricable from, and firmly rooted to the poetics and politics of place. More importantly, the couple’s movements throughout the film are predicated on having agential choice to move. From Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, it is the presence of choice that ultimately drives their relationship either away from Hong Kong and away from each other, or towards Buenos Aires and towards each other. Instead of privileging Jameson’s national allegory over Po-wing and Yu-fai’s relationship in Happy Together, it is necessary to view the two forces as intimately intertwined.
Esther M.K. Cheung, like many critics, notes in Hong Kong Screenscapes From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier that Wong’s oeuvre is itself a travelogue.[xiii] Happy Together follows Po-wing and Yu-fai to Argentina, Chang Chen from Argentina to the southernmost tip to South America, and then Yu-fai to night-markets in Taiwan and back to Hong Kong. Wong’s earlier film Days of Being Wild, is first rooted in Hong Kong, and then to the Philippines as Yuddy looks for his birth mother. Not only are Wong’s films set all over the world, but his characters all seem to journey from city to city, and country to country, always as parts of the narrative structure of the films. Such sustained investments in space, movement, travel, and journeys both shape and are shaped by Wong’s characters.
In Days of Being Wild, Wong first introduces Yuddy by attaching him to symbols of travel. Released more than half a decade prior to Happy Together, Days of Being Wild focuses on Yuddy, the character set at the nucleus of the film. As a womanizer, Wong’s film follows Yuddy’s relationships from conception to failure, and attributes his inability to maintain these relationships to his unresolved obsession with finding his biological mother. From the beginning, the camera follows Yuddy from behind as he carries a light blue bag with a Pan-Am logo over his left shoulder. Wearing the Pan-Am logo – itself an emblem of international travel – as a possession, material symbols in the film prime the ways in which we characterize Yuddy as someone defined by flight. Yuddy’s bag foreshadows his tendency to travel throughout the film as he moves from woman to woman, and later, from his foster-mother in Hong Kong to his biological mother in the Philippines.
Just as Po-wing and Yu-fai’s relationship structures their journeys, Yuddy’s movement and journeys are similarly propelled by his connections with those around him. When Wong first introduces Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, not only is the character carrying the symbolic blue bag, he is also in pursuit of Li-Zhen. The camera follows Yuddy closely as he walks down the corridor to meet Li-Zhen to buy a bottle of Coke. In this scene, the bottle of Coke functions similarly to Yuddy’s Pan-Am bag – both items function as material items testifying to Yuddy’s character. This scene is repeated again the next day. As the camera follows Yuddy’s movements closely, the sound of his shoes against the floor works as if to propel the camera forward. The sound of Yuddy’s feet against the floor echoes through the hallway until he reaches the noodle bar. When the camera then moves ahead of Yuddy, the screen splits into two. On the left side, the camera captures Li-Zhen with her arms crossed and leaning over the counter with her head drooped. On the right side of the screen, Yuddy is still moving towards the bar. As Wong captures the two characters in one image, he juxtaposes the stationary Li-Zhen with Yuddy’s body in motion. Such a juxtaposition between motion and motionlessness amplifies the distance and difference between Li-Zhen and Yuddy at the beginning of their relationship. In pursuit of Li-Zhen, Yuddy’s moving body signifies his desire for her as he moves towards her. The immediate fault with fixing on Yuddy’s movement towards Li-Zhen as symbolic only of his attraction to her largely eclipses the urgency of attending carefully to how movement itself characterizes Yuddy’s desires throughout Days of Being Wild.
After Li-Zhen and Yuddy sleep together, Li-Zhen asks, “Would you ever marry me?” to which Yuddy responds “No.” Upon hearing Yuddy’s response, Li-Zhen walks across the room, zips up her skirt, and begins to walk out of the room only to pause and turn around to warn him that “[she]’ll never come back.” Exploring this particular interaction calls our attention to the ways in which Yuddy and Li-Zhen move around the bedroom in accordance with, and as a reflection of their desires. As Li-Zhen asks Yuddy about marriage, the latter stands in front of the mirror and combs his hair. He does not even turn away from his reflection to respond to her question. In contrast, Li-Zhen’s anger toward Yuddy’s response propels her across the room, out the door, and away from Yuddy. In this scene, what is particularly important to note is that Yuddy remains mostly motionless throughout the scene – a metaphor of his lack of desire for Li-Zhen.
After Yuddy’s love affair with Li-Zhen, he meets Mimi. Predictably, Yuddy fails to stay with her for long before becoming quickly disinterested in her. Similar to Wong’s use of the metaphoric refrain, “how about we start over” in Happy Together, Wong also employs metaphor in Days of Being Wild. Throughout the film, Yuddy repeats the metaphor of the legless bird. The first time Yuddy describes the bird, he is lying on his bed smoking a cigarette. Yuddy’s narration begins, “I’ve heard that there’s a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life, and that’s when it dies.” Metaphorizing his identity to “a bird with no legs,” Yuddy defines himself by mobility and flight. Not only does the image of the bird characterize his tendency for flight, but this image also works as his lifeline. For the bird can “only land once in its life, and that’s when it dies.” Ultimately, wielding the flightless bird metaphor as his lifeline marks Yuddy as rootless, wandering, and, more acutely, unsettled until death. Furthermore, his commitment to movement and flight captures the enterprise of solitude her performs throughout the film.
When Yuddy’s foster mother tells him that she is going to America, he begs her one last time to tell him about his biological mother. His foster mother regrets telling Yuddy about his birth mother and laments, “I should not have let you know before. But I’ve told you. For you are not my blood, you will leave me.” As Yuddy’s foster mother points to the significance of blood relations and kinship, she admits that they are not related and that Yuddy is “not [her] blood.” By underscoring filial relations as the determining force for “leaving [her],” Yuddy’s foster mother renders movement – both leaving and staying – as contingent on blood relations. In response, Yuddy also processes that “I only want to know who my parents are.”
This singular desire, to only “want to know who my parents are” steers Yuddy to the Philippines later in the movie. Interestingly, there is a central ambiguity in this proclamation. On the one hand, the emphasis can be placed on the verb to “want” or the verb to “know.” If we place an emphasis on the former verb to “want,” Yuddy then says that “I only want to know who my parents are.” Reading this proclamation in dialogue with Yuddy’s metaphor of the legless bird, his “want to know” keeps him (or the legless bird) alive and flying. On the other hand, if we are to emphasize Yuddy’s desire to “know” who his parents are, his desire translated through the metaphor of the legless bird can then be also read as his desire to land and to die. Both readings underline how Yuddy’s movements throughout the film are ultimately rooted in desire and structures of kinship.
At the end of the film, when Yuddy and Tide ride the train in the Philippines, Yuddy relays the story of the legless bird for the second time. Interrupting Yuddy, Tide says, “How are you like a bird? If you could fly, you would not have to be here. Go and fly, if you have such an ability.” After finding out that his biological mother has rejected him, Yuddy loses his singular desire, his “want[ing] to know who [his] parents are” that kept him flying. As Tide accurately notes, Yuddy no longer has “such an ability.” Having lost both the desire (the “want”) and the “know[ledge]” of his parents, Yuddy can no longer fly. From Li-Zhen to Mimi, from his foster mother to his biological mother, and from Hong Kong to the Philippines, Yuddy’s movements must come to an end as his one desire becomes foreclosed by his biological mother’s rejection of him.
The final time we hear the metaphor of the legless bird is when the narrator revises the story: “There was a bird, which flew and flew until it died. It never goes anywhere, because it died from the start.” Immobile, and “never go[ing] anywhere,” the narrator stages Yuddy’s fate at the end of the film. Determining Yuddy as dead “from the start,” each move that Yuddy has made throughout the film, each attempt to start over, is negated by characterizing him as already dead. Paralleling this sense of immobility is the way that Wong ends Days of Being Wild with the same panning shot of the palm trees tinged in blue that opens the film. By drawing the narrative to a close with repetition, and a return to the same slow panning shot, Wong reinvests in the metaphor of the legless bird. By replaying the same scene, Wong calcifies the film’s structure as one that “never goes anywhere.”
By retranslating Po-wing’s refrain from “let’s start over” to “how about we start over” in Happy Together and analyzing the metaphor of the legless bird in Days of Being Wild, movement across borders can be understood not simply as an allegory of national anxiety entirely calibrated by Hong Kong’s impending 1997 Handover. Instead, movements and transnational journeys in Wong’s films become inextricable from structures of kinship and the desire to belong. More importantly, although structures of kinship are not only partially derived from nationality, they also surpass national ideology. Using love and desire as frameworks that drive characters to move away and towards each other, national allegory proves to be a limiting, if not wholly inadequate, means of reading ‘Third World’ texts. By elevating and privileging structures of kinship and intrapersonal relationships in Wong’s movies as forces continuously in dialogue with movement across space, we resist foreclosing the radical potential of what Jameson describes as “Third World” narratives.
Edna Wan is in her last year at McGill. Currently, she is finishing up her English Literature Honours degree, with a joint minor in History and East Asian Studies. Her English thesis is an exploration of Transpacific citizenship and representations of the June 4th student protests at Tiananmen Square in the contemporary Asian American novel. With a particular interest in Asian American literature, the East Asian studies department offers her alternative approaches for studying Transpacific citizenship.
NOTES
[i] Ong, Han and Wong Kar-wai. “Wong Kar-wai by Han Ong” Bomb Magazine.https://bombmagazine.org/articles/wong-kar-wai-1/ (accessed December 28, 2018)
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] [iii] Jeng, Jonah. “No-Home Movie: Emotional Dislocation in ‘Happy Together’ and ‘Moonlight’” The Film Stage. https://thefilmstage.com/features/no-home-movie-emotional-dislocation-in-happy-together-and-moonlight/ (accessed December 28, 2018).
[iv] Lee, Edmund. “In Pictures: Wong Kar-wai’s Romantic Film Happy Together Turns 20.” South China Morning Post. https://www.scoopnest.com/user/SCMP_News/864233959454109696-in-pictures-wong-kar-wais-romantic-film-happy-together-turns-20 (accessed December 28, 2018)
[v] Chan, Andrew. “Review: Days of Being Wild” Slant Magazine. https://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/days-of-being-wild (accessed December 28, 2018)
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Durham: Duke University Press. 2016. Pg. 128.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Durham: Duke University Press. 2016. Pg. 128.
[x] Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kingship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2010.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Cheng, Esther M.K, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See Kam, eds. Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2011. Pg. 20.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1997.
Chan, Andrew. “Review: Days of Being Wild” Slant Magazine. https://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/days-of-being-wild (accessed December 28, 2018)
Cheng, Esther M.K, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See Kam, eds. Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2011.
Eagleton, Terry, and Drew Milne. Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, Blackwell. 1996.
Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kingship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2010.
Jeng, Jonah. “No-Home Movie: Emotional Dislocation in ‘Happy Together’ and ‘Moonlight’” The Film Stage. https://thefilmstage.com/features/no-home-movie-emotional-dislocation-in-happy-together-and-moonlight/ (accessed December 28, 2018)
Lee, Edmund. “In Pictures: Wong Kar-wai’s Romantic Film Happy Together Turns 20.” South China Morning Post. https://www.scoopnest.com/user/SCMP_News/864233959454109696-in-pictures-wong-kar-wais-romantic-film-happy-together-turns-20 (accessed December 28, 2018)
Ong, Han and Wong Kar-wai. “Wong Kar-wai by Han Ong” Bomb Magazine. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/wong-kar-wai-1/ (accessed December 28, 2018)
Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Durham: Duke University Press. 2016.
Wong, Kar-wai. Days of Being Wild. DVD. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. Hong Kong: In-Gear Film Production. 1990.
Wong, Kar-wai. Happy Together. DVD. Directed by Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle. Hong Kong: Kino International. 1997.
Orientations - McGill University's East Asian Studies Journal 