The demarcation of aging in units of ten should have felt superfluous, but I was then especially susceptible to its imposing implications. Along with the exhaustion that inevitably accompanies the end of an arduous project, I was struck by a pang of panic for something lost that went beyond just youth. That something came in the images in my mind of the scenes from a movie I had seen a long time ago.
In **Wong Kar Wai’**s deeply melancholic film, In the Mood for Love, about a pair of lovers who never consummate their love, beautifulMaggie Cheung appears in qipaos of various patterns and colors in virtually every scene. The entire movie is an homage to life, a rehearsal for their dreams of love, although neither lover realizes that the waiting itself is the love. We see the breathtaking shots of Maggie in qipaos listlessly walking down steps with a noodle container in her hand, or standing by a phone in self-conscious hesitation, or sitting on a bed alone in silence, always waiting for something to happen.
I was in my late twenties when I first saw the film. I had just finished a novel that took me five years to write but which failed to get published. Reeling from the ensuing heartbreak, I was dabbling with another draft, about a Korean-American interpreter named Suzy, which would later be my first published novel. I was single and had not been in love with anybody for as long as I could recall, and I would not be for many years still, although I did not know it then. But, like Maggie, I was waiting for life to happen, and what that life was, I did not know. The not knowing drove me crazy.
I think I saw the film at a theater in the East Village that no longer exists, with a friend who has long stopped being a friend, and who would end up publishing the novel she was working on and become a literary darling. I, on the other end, would stumble on a murky path of literary journalism to investigate North Korea, a field dominated almost entirely by men and a few intrepid correspondent-type women, which I was not. I was an aspiring novelist still, perpetually afraid and perpetually uncertain.
That afternoon, however, after seeing Maggie in her qipaos, which appeared to me like a magical armor, I skipped down to Chinatown’s Canal Street in search of something similar. I scrolled through the racks of cheap knockoffs and narrowed it down to one in a shade called “cherry blossom.” When I put it on at home later, I saw that I looked nothing like the brooding beauty of my imagination, but a girl in polyester who would invite the passing slurs of “Hey, China doll” on New York streets, though I was neither doll-like nor Chinese.