The Brief Idyll of Late-Nineties Wong Kar-Wai

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Tash Aw revisits Wong Kar-Wai’s 1997 film Happy Together.

Still from Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together”

In the summer of 1997 I was living in London, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’d left college and had been in the city for a year, trying, like so many other twentysomethings, to write a novel. I’d given myself a year, but as the chapters took shape so did a curious tension about the way my life was playing out. Part of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people—my people—that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider.

But the increasing clarity