by Danielle Shi
Dark glasses, wrote Roland Barthes, have been an operative method for the amorous subject, a way for him to disguise himself or cacher, “to hide”. “To what degree … should [he] conceal the turbulences of his passion: his desires, his distresses: in short, his excesses”? Caught in a double bind by the lures of impassivity and discretion, he is as though a butterfly fixed in place in a glass box. Perfectly on display, yet immobilized, as though afraid any sudden movement will scare off his beloved and send her running.
No such problems present for our heroine, Faye, who grabs the bull by its horns and chases after Cop 663 with candor and perseverance—though she certainly does utilize her accessory as a way to hide in plain sight in their small world, so as to further her chances of capturing him through her playful wiles.
Faye’s cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” often escapes direct translation: the song title, “掙脫” or “zhēngtuō”, more accurately calls to mind breaking free. Dreams, in a manner of speaking, are our way of eluding reality and escaping the seeming rigidity of monotonous daily routines: a breaking-apart of the banal; for Faye’s character, caught on camera sipping on a glass of coffee behind the sandwich shop counter, the dream intervenes with an irresistible presence.
“I’m not daydreaming!” she says to her cousin and boss when he scolds her for spacing out. “That’s right. You’re sleepwalking!” “That’s right, I’m sleepwalking,” she echoes when he leaves, nodding her head up and down bouncily. “Whatever you say. I’m sleepwalking.” She waves her arms over her head then, swaying back and forth and joining her likewise-daydreaming Indian coworker in the industrial kitchen, the two romping around lightheartedly as though at a dance hall.
“I had a dream that afternoon,” Faye says in the same scene, in a voiceover. “It seemed I was in [Cop 663’s] apartment, and that I’d wake up when I left. I didn’t know you never wake from some dreams.” Without further ado, we become onlookers, star witnesses, to an impromptu hide-and-seek game, as Cop 663 walks around his bachelor pad playing games with his imagination, mourning the loss of his flight attendant girlfriend and ironically unaware of Faye tiptoeing around him with stealth and a refreshing whimsy. It is a surreal rendezvous, one that takes place mentally and in the space of desire and fantastic hope.
Sightlines and the act of seeing are played up for dramatic irony throughout Chungking Express, as Wong Kar Wai stages chance encounters between his characters that aren’t so determined by chance after all. As though daydreams realizing themselves, his collisions are determined by the fugitive desires of the love interests, making their accidental comingtogethers a product of illusion—the very act of performance pointing to itself. If all the world’s a stage, is their sweetly laughable crossing of paths so very different from our own probing machinations?
The glasses make a reappearance when Faye is decked out in her new flight attendant uniform, ready to take off for California Dreamin’, pondering the future in a rainy window behind a Golden State sign.
In her new heels and knee-length pencil skirt, wearing a carbon copy of Cop 663’s ex-girlfriend’s familiar white blouse, who does she bump into when she opens up shop but the man himself; unbeknownst to her, he has taken over the family business. He asks her about California, turning down the loud music she likes, as she checks her reflection in the window. “California was okay. Nothing special,” she says, adjusting her uniform. “You look good in uniform.” She peers at him from behind sunglasses that have slipped down her nose, which she pinches gently, as though to remind herself of who she is with. Who she has no need to play cat-and-mouse with or elude any longer in wildest dreams and daydreams, in spectacles of the surreal and in wanting synchronized encounters.
Who they each have chosen—her writing him a new boarding pass on a napkin as he brings his body close.
Danielle Shi is a writer from Dalian, China. Her writing can be found at The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, Jaded Ibis Press, ZYZZYVA Magazine Blog, The Drift, Hyphen Magazine, and Common Forms. Her novel manuscript Arrhythmia was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction in 2024. Shi will be working on her novel The Shelter in 2025 through residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, and PLAYA Summer Lake.