In The Mood For Food: Part 1 of 2
Memory, metonymy, and the melancholy of émigrés in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 masterpiece. For paid subscribers: recipe included in Part 2.
CHOUETTE by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco Press, 2021): Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Tiny is pregnant, but she’s not sure exactly how that happened. Her husband has no idea what’s coming. When Chouette is born, she is broken-winged, violent, and strange. Her husband is hell-bent on curing their daughter, but Tiny fights for her child’s true nature. A monstrous tale of motherhood.
“You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?
I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.”
FIVE PAYWALL-FREE ONLINE MUST READS:
“Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?” by Kate Harding (Dame: January 7, 2022)
“Freud, Facts, and Folly“ by Sebastian Stockman (Majuscule: December 20, 2021)
“Just Like Brandma Made” by Cathy Erway (TASTE: December 14, 2021)
“Does Making Predictions Impede the Formation of Memories?” by Hannah Seo (Catapult: September 22, 2021)
“My Shadow Book: On Consciously—Or Unconsciously—Immortalizing Ex-Partners in Literary Fiction” by Andrew Palmer (LitHub: republished from Hogarth on August 17, 2021)
WHERE TO FIND MY LATEST WORK: “My Mother Told Stories Through Hmong Embroidery, I Use the Pen”—as seen in Memoir Monday—published online at Catapult magazine on February 8, 2022.
Coming up next: illustrations for a personal essay by a mixed-race Canadian Jamaican writer on interracial romance and code-switching at The Rumpus.
In The Mood For Love Food: Part 1 of 2
All paid subscribers: recipe behind paywall in Part 2. Founder-level paid subscribers will receive their first illustrated digital poster, based on an essay featured in Librovore, via email on/by April 1, 2022. Part 2 released on February 25.
I. Here and Now
Think of a person you loved from your past.
Can you remember how it started? Or do these moments blur together into a river of memory, the hours and days imperceptible except for particular details—the intimate minutiae of private moments—that only you would know?
When I try to remember the face of a man I had once loved, long ago (when I first arrived in the city), his features slide in all directions like melting wax. He was very handsome, in the way that all first loves are. How could I forget such a face? My eyes had devoured the tilt of his eyes and the tiny scar curved like a beckoning finger on his lower lip. He introduced me to a new way of seeing the routine world. He taught me the proper way to enjoy dim sum and tea culture. Inspired, I tried to teach myself how to make these foods at home. I had spent many nights watching his profile in shadow as we slept, preparing for his future departure. I had always known that he would leave first.
Now, when I try to picture his face, he hides behind smoked waterglass. I remember the names of the dishes we ate—har gao, siu mai, lo mai gai, char siu bao by the dozen—but everything else about him I have forgotten except for three small things: a thin strip of skin cutting the comet’s tail of his right eyebrow, the hooked scar, and a mole, like mine, in the same exact place.
Given enough time, all memories disintegrate into nostalgia. Memories become dollhouse dramas, starring projections of ourselves that we can observe only as outsiders.
In Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, we are the camera obscura: we spy and eavesdrop on conversations we shouldn’t hear; our eyes lurk around alleyways and peek through windows to watch four people’s lives intersect and disconnect. We intuit that there is more to the story, but all we’re allowed are glimpses of a glittering prism where identities are broken and refracted into a kaleidoscope of glass flowers.
This is a film about heartbreak and anguish. It is also a meditation on time and migration; on the self that is always searching for a safe homecoming.
II: Hong Kong, 1962
The first time Mrs. Chan/Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Chiu-wai Leung), two recent Shanghainese émigrés from mainland China, meet in the hallway of a boarding house in Hong Kong, it is so fleeting that it is forgettable. But isn’t that how it always starts?
Every two minutes, someone is eating or drinking, or being invited to join breakfast, lunch, or dinner in In the Mood for Love. There is always a pot or a cup of tea, or coffee, within arm’s reach. The green teacups follow everyone, everywhere. In the kitchen of cramped apartments, something is boiling over. In the bedroom, paper plates with cold noodles congeal on the bedside table.
Food is both an excuse to escape prying eyes, and a consolation for neglect. Mrs. Chan slips away from her claustrophobic apartment by going out for noodles alone, but we never see her eat. Mr. Chow wolfs down wonton dumplings alone, unaware that his neighbor was just there. They are married, but their spouses are always away. They are invited by friends, co-workers, and their landlords to dinner, but always decline. Instead of a hearty meal of fish, pork soup, vegetable dumplings and steamed rice, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow descend the steps, separately, to the dai pai dong—the streetside noodle soup stall—an excuse, really, for some breathing room.
One night, while passing each other in the dark corridor, they exchange the briefest of glances. Their mutual curiosity transforms to horror. When they see each other again, in the hallway of their adjacent apartments, they address each other politely while snatching discreet glances at what the other is wearing. Many viewers miss this flash of recognition: a necktie and a purse, both available only from Japan. Each a metonym for a spouse in absentia. The cruel evidence of an affair.
This shameful secret bonds them in mutual sympathy, and they begin dining together in a private booth at Sun Kwong Nam Restaurant—an upscale restaurant serving Hong Kong’s “soy sauce Western” fusion cuisine—to commiserate and project their missing spouses à table. “Order for me,” Su tells Chow. She slices into a medium-rare ribeye steak with roasted potatoes, and he leans over to add a dab of mustard onto her plate. “Your wife likes spicy food,” she coughs. Su rehearses what she will say to her husband when she finally confronts him. “Do you have a mistress?” she asks Chow. “Tell me.”
As they grow more familiar with each other, Nat King Cole croons “Quizás, quizás, quizás.” Su promises Chow, “We won’t be like them.” But feelings are contagious.
Siempre que te pregunto
Que cuándo, cómo y dónde
Tu siempre me respondes
Quizás, quizás, quizás
Y así pasan los días
Y yo desesperando
Y tu, tu contestando
Quizás, quizás, quizás
Estas perdiendo el tiempo
Pensando, pensando
Por lo que mas tu quieras
Hasta cuándo, hasta cuándo — lyrics from “Quizás, quizás, quizás”
The clocks continue to keep the time. The dinner invitations continue coming. They continue to be declined. The same booth is always available at Sun Kwong Nam. The city is humid, and hums with white noise. Nothing changes, except their feelings.
“This is only a rehearsal,” Chow tells Su. “This isn’t real.”
Food and desire mirror each other throughout the film. This was intentional, if you understand that In the Mood for Love didn’t start out as a tale of doomed romance.
“When we started the project I wanted to make a film about food, so I called the project Three Stories about Food, which is the regional title of In the Mood for Love. The idea was to have three stories which described the way food affects people. (. . . .) [W]e can see that the roles of men and women have changed a lot because of the habit of eating.” —Wong Kar-wai (“Leçon de cinéma,” 2001 Cannes International Film Festival)
The relationships between married men and women are especially in question: Mrs. Chan admits that she doesn’t cook; Mr. Chow surprises his wife at work for an early dinner, but she has already left; Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow are spied on by Mr. Chow’s friend, Ping. The spouses never eat together. Although we never see the faces of Mrs. Chow or Mr. Chan, they look strangely familiar. It turns out that Cheung and Leung were also stand-ins for these characters. This blurring of identities, Chan/Chow, was inspired by Wong’s admiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense story structure.
“At first I wanted to have all four characters in the film played by Maggie (Cheung) and Tony (Leung), both the wife and Mrs. Chan, and the husband and Mr. Chow. (. . . .) [The film] to me is actually like a thriller, a story with a lot of suspense. So we always kept the spouses, the husband and the wife, somewhere outside of the frame. We can’t see them, but there’s always a kind of clue.” —Wong Kar-wai
This twinning literally appears in scenes where one or both spouses are reflected in mirrors. Silhouettes are further spliced by glass shelves, windowpanes, and doorways. At times, we’re not even sure at whom we’re looking. Secrets and cover-up stories appear seamlessly collaged, until you notice the addition or subtraction of one small detail. The rejected spouses simulate intimacy, rehearsing scenarios with their absent spouses over dinner, until the lines between reality and pretend are so blurred that neither person can tell the difference. Even while alone, their reflections watch them. “One can’t put a foot wrong,” Su warns Chow, because no one can fully escape this diamond of surveillance and self-deception.
So why not call the film Secrets then? Wong told BOMB magazine that “Cannes said no,” because that movie title was overused.
The movie had undergone too many transformations to be simplified so easily. Leung revealed that the movie was originally conceived as a light comedy with the working title Beijing Summer, but that concept was scrapped when production was denied access to filming at Tiananmen Square.
Wong pivoted, and continued directing the romantic comedy, but then changed his mind after the first day of shooting. He realized the film was in the wrong genre. He considered naming the film after a popular song by Zhou Xuan, “花樣的年華 (“Age of Blossoms” or literal translation: “flower-like golden years”),” a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting bloom of youth, or “the most beautiful time of your life,” but decided on its English name after listening to Bryan Ferry’s 1999 cover of “I’m in the Mood for Love.” In fact, he named the movie at the last minute to meet the submission deadline for Cannes.
The 1946 song appears toward the end of the film when her husband, Mr. Chan, requests (from Japan) that the local radio station play the song for her birthday. You may recognize the intro, because it sounds very similar to “Happy Birthday to You.” As the song plays, Su and Chow sit forlornly in their separate hallways. It is presumably Mr. Chow’s final days in Hong Kong. Neither person is aware that their twin is sitting with their back against the mutual wall, mourning the end of something that had started naively as a platonic friendship. They are pensive and withdrawn, in spite of happiness within reach.
花樣的年華,月樣的精神,冰雪樣的聰明。 美麗的生活,多情的眷屬,圓滿的家庭。
驀地裡這孤島籠罩著慘霧愁雲,慘霧愁雲。啊!可愛的祖國幾時我能夠投進你的懷抱,能見那霧消雲散,重見你放出光明。
花樣的年華,月樣的精神。
Love in the Mood, spirit like the moon, intelligence like snow and ice.
A beautiful life, a loving family, a complete family.
All of a sudden, this lonely island is shrouded in tragic mist and gloomy clouds.
What! When will I be able to fall into your arms, my lovely motherland,
I can see the fog dissipate, and I see you shining bright again.
Mood for years, moon-like spirit. — lyrics from “花樣的年華”
Perhaps Su will leave for Singapore with Chow. Perhaps Chow will wait for her in hotel room 2046. Perhaps they can admit their real feelings. Quizás, quizás, quizás.
The film’s story arc plays with uncertainty and indecision, much like what was experienced during production: when Wong approached the actors Cheung and Leung to play the lead characters, neither actor was given the full script. Instead, they were asked to interpret each scene to the best of their acting ability—sans rehearsals.
“[Wong] wouldn’t tell me what he wanted,” Leung told TIME Asia in October 2000, after winning the Best Actor Award that May. “You need to make yourself very flexible with Kar-wai. You have to turn yourself inside out . . . I think that Kar-wai feels that if you know a character, you’re no longer acting, and therefore it restricts [you].”
When Leung watched the final cut of the film during its world premiere at Cannes, he did not recognize himself at all. He felt like an “outsider.” He and his co-star had struggled with the ending scenes.
“Both of us wanted more,” Leung told TIME Asia. “But unfortunately, Kar-wai wouldn’t allow it. Maybe that’s why making the movie was so exhausting and frustrating. I kept telling Kar-wai that my battery was running out. I kept on stressing because there was no scene for me to express myself.” In the end, Leung, the actor, was unable to reenter the story and thus became a voyeur to his own performance. And that may be Wong’s ultimate point: a script promises nothing, because life and feelings are messy.
Wong’s director of photography and reliable collaborator, Christopher Doyle, was infamous for ignoring scripts and improvising shots entirely in media res. For In the Mood for Love, Wong only asked that Doyle lose the frenetic energy of their previous film, Chungking Express. “[Chris] is like a jazz musician,” Wong told the crowd at the 2001 Cannes International Film Festival. Wong played a CD of the music to set the mood, and Doyle responded by composing and framing the scene on the spot.
In the film, there is always something obstructing our view. Wong and Doyle wanted us, the viewer, to be the nosiest neighbor of all. Each scene is a technicolored clue toward the conclusion, although that was a mystery to all (except to Wong). Collaborators were expected to approach the story using their own intuitions. The film risked wandering on without an ending. At some point, the story would simply have to stop. Even a good dream can’t go on forever.
Here are four songs to reset your mood to watch In the Mood for Love:
“花樣的年華 (Full Bloom)” by Zhou Xuan (1946): originally sung by “The Golden Voice” for a film. Wong and his mother spent their days watching Mandarin-language films at home when the family left Shanghai for Hong Kong. Neither spoke Cantonese, and these films harkened back to a golden era in mainland China prior to Communism.
“Quizás, quizás, quizás” by Osvaldo Farrés (1947): sung by Nat King Cole (1958) with a very heavy American accent. Cole was his mother’s favorite singer, and Latin music was very popular in Hong Kong because of Filipino musicians and nightclub entertainers. Literal translation: “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.”
“I’m in the Mood for Love” (1935)—sung by Bryan Ferry (1999): The original song was performed by Frances Langford for the film Every Night at Eight (1935), where she plays an aspiring singer who collapses from hunger in the middle of a radio talent contest.
“Yumeji’s Theme” by Shigeru Umebayashi (1991): a waltz that is repeated whenever Su and Chow encounter each other in private, e.g. the narrow corridor leading to the dai pai dong and hotel room 2046. 💋
If you’re an editor interested in republishing any part of this original work, please provide a link back to Librovore. All words and illustrations ©️2022 Lisa Lee Herrick. 📧 hello@lisaleeherrick.com.