The Queer Space of China: Expressive Desire in Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu

How to achieve a new understanding of the Chinese revolution, of the legacy of socialism, and of the achievements as well as the tragedies of this legacy are major questions urgently in need of address from Chinese intellectuals, but to which they have so far been unable to respond.

— Wang Hui “The 1989 Social Movement and China’s Neoliberalism”

Almost every generalization about China — that it is a communist-led socialist society as before, that at its core it is a society of traditionally centralized power, that it has nearly become capitalist, that it is a full-fledged consumer society, or even that it is already “postmodern” — can be supported, while the characterization diametrically opposed can be backed with an equal number of examples.

— Wang Xiaoming “China on the Brink of a ‘Momentous Era’ ”

One of the features of new Hong Kong cinema is its sensitivity to spatial issues, in other words, to dislocations and discontinuities, and its adoption of spatial narratives both to underline and to come to terms with these historical anachronisms and achronisms: space as a means of reading the elusiveness of history. We get a better sense of the history of Hong Kong through its new cinema (and architecture) than is currently available in any history book.

— Ackbar Abbas Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

Embrace 1

In Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu (2001), there are two significant moments of reunion between Chen Handong (Hu Jin) and Lan Yu (Liu Ye).¹ Both are marked by Handong’s spontaneous embrace of his younger lover. These embraces signal the restarting of their on-again-off-again homosexual relationship, one initiated when Handong, a well-connected and prosperous businessman in a booming 1980s Beijing, first hires Lan Yu for a late-night assignation. The desperation of Handong’s violent clasping of Lan Yu, a poor college student from the rural northeast, marks a sudden upsurge of emotion beyond the older man’s affective control. In this regard, while it might be accurate to state that Handong “expresses” in these two instances his desire for Lan Yu, it would be equally correct to say that such expressive desire speaks as much as is spoken by Handong.

One embrace occurs approximately two-thirds of the way through Kwan’s film. After a period of prolonged separation from Lan Yu initiated by Handong’s unilateral decision to “grow up” and to marry his female translator Jingping (Su Jin), the businessman finds his life in a fiscal as well as emotional shambles. Recently divorced, he has not only suffered a number of financial setbacks, but also crashed his car. Running into Lan Yu at the airport, Handong manages to extract a reluctant dinner invitation from his former lover, a now more mature and sober twenty-seven-year-old architect. Following an evening of drunken confession, Handong is roused from his intoxicated slumber on the living room couch and told by Lan Yu that it is time for him to leave. In response, Handong clutches Lan Yu in a desperate embrace, wondering aloud, “Whatever made me let you go?”

Figure 1.

Embrace 1: “Whatever made me let you go?” Lan Yu

Like nearly every other scene in Kwan’s quiet and beautiful film, this reunion between the two lovers is punctuated visually by a series of reflective shots in a mirror. Indeed, Kwan and cinematographer Yang Tao present throughout the film numerous mirrors and windows, whose visual logic is to bring together not only two disparate spaces, but also the disconnected lovers occupying them. In the sequence leading up to this embrace, Handong stands in the doorway outside the kitchen where Lan Yu is preparing dinner. Handong occupies the left side of the screen, facing Lan Yu, who is off-screen, as the two engage in a verbal exchange about their former times together. While Handong’s interlocutor is visually absent — the camera is unable to capture Lan Yu’s movements inside the kitchen — this space is indexed not just by...