Fridae

Ho Yuk: Let's Love Hong Kong (2002)
Written, directed, and produced by Yau Ching
Starring: Wong Chung Ching as Chan Kwok Chan, Erica Lam as Zero, Colette Koo as Nicole, Maria Cordero as Mama and Wella Cheung as Sex Worker

It is still uncommon for filmgoers to see Asian lesbians represented on screen. When that is narrowed down to credible Chinese lesbian characters, the choices within that is even more poignantly unavailable. This has largely to do with the expensiveness of making films, even indie ones on DV-Cam and not to do with a shortage of directorial, scriptwriting or acting talent among Asian lesbians themselves. After all the worldwide population of Asian women is more than half a billion strong, and if one follows conventional and conservative estimates, globally there are 25 million queer women of Asian descent. Thus, one tends to depend on more progressive film festivals to occasionally savour celluloid Asian lesbian lives. Earlier this month, I had the chance to catch the Canadian premiere of Yau Ching's indie film, Ho Yuk: Let's Love Hong Kong.

Yau Ching's film is interesting in the way the Hong Kong-born director reads the dance of Chinese lesbian desire post-1997. Yau Ching did a good job showing the toughness and impossible claustrophobia of women's lives in Hong Kong's public housing estates, and how hard it is to make a living. Herself, an out lesbian, she showed aspects of being lesbian realistically at the same time she showed how colonisation of the Cantonese by the British and Chinese reticence, "repressiveness" � Yau Ching's word, make lives very interior. The best moments of the film came from the use of Cantonese; the English subtitles, the English language can't do the job for the Cantonese language. Furthermore, as more than one friend noted, it is very precious that Yau Ching's film does not offer an easy entry for straight men, that is, there are no voyeuristic positions to occupy.

Yau Ching's film does not depict the reductive formulaic approach to the narrative of lesbian desire. Her characters are not hysterical nor sufferers of heterosexual projections of melodrama onto the defining yet distanced 'Other.' Her film is also nonlinear. It is slow in some stretches, probably to mirror a slice of life, the non-A-to-Z route of desire, women-to-women desire in particular. At the same time, that deliberate slowing down of filming and framing also reflects Chinese women's public reticence around their sexualities and desire. As well, hyper-urban people tend to be rather isolated individuals leading compartmentalised lives. Hence the sheer interiority of two of the main lesbian characters, while having a true to life feel, also poignantly portrays the tensions felt by isolated women and the lesbians who like them.

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Nicole, for example, a driven Alpha head of a very profitable company is a lesbian in the closet. Already a mature woman, she still feels the pressure not to come out and make herself vulnerable to all kinds of unwanted projections, prejudices and ignorance. Thus not only is her sexual orientation and her sexuality highly-veiled, Yau Ching's film shows that Nicole runs a higher and higher risk of being hidden from herself, a painful and empty way to live.

There are several heartwarming moments in the film, such as between mom and grown-up lesbian daughter, the seduction scene between the baby butch and the older lesbian; the young one was the 'aggressor' and the overt seducer. I couldn't stop thinking about how kind the mom was, although the conditions of her life were shitty: they lived in the tiniest apartment, in a really rundown housing estate, with a fairly useless husband glued to the TV, swatting flies.

At the Vancouver premiere in early October, Yau Ching fielded a wide variety of questions from her audience. Yau Ching is an excellent raconteur. She is great at Q & A and manages to answer even questions from left field. She is versed in cultural productions in diverse ways, she teaches video making and cultural theory in a Hong Kong institution. Her film, Ho Yuk, won an award in Portugal and has been screened in the US and other countries. I ran into friends who know Yau Ching and we did the Asian as well as the Western thing: we combined siew yeh (Cantonese for supper), late night snacks with beer. Beer and siew yeh tasted better than usual because we were, and were among, a bunch of unfettered Chinese lesbians.

Walking Yau Ching back to her Vancouver hotel, accommodation courtesy of her host, the Vancouver International Film Festival, Yau Ching mentioned that her film was shown in Singapore and many young Singaporean lesbians wrote to her after seeing her film and have kept in contact with her. It is clear that the young Singaporeans valued their contact with Yau Ching as much as she valued theirs.

While it is true that tastes in films are like tastes for shoes, that evening Yau Ching's film answered my Malaysian-Singaporean Chinese lesbian shoes that these days traverse the streets of Vancouver.

Sook C. Kong writes poetry and fiction, as well as reviews books and films. Her poetry and stories have been published in various journals in Canada and the U.S. She is the recipient of the 2002 International Poet of Merit Award given by the US-based International Society of Poets. She enjoys teaching but not marking; she teaches university literature, composition and visual culture. Sook lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.