"Undercurrents" in Hold You Tight

“Undercurrents” in Hold You Tight: from Faye Wong to Anthony Wong

I fear tragedy will recur I am fated in my fate To be out of touch with what’s beautiful History repeats itself In this bustling city It is not possible To love without undercurrents What use is there for me to go on cherishing you? If I hold you tight this time Will it not be another empty embrace? Still quietly waiting For you to say I’m too sensitive I have a sense of foreboding about everything And then I cannot open my eyes to see fate arrive And then clouds gather around the skies

--Lin Xi (Lam Jik), “Undercurrents” (excerpt, translated by Helen Hok-Sze Leung)

Faye Wong's version

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3qlPHheL4k

Trailer from Hold You Tight with an excerpt of Anthony Wong's version

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4OewZt3j18

Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents:  Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, UBC Press, Vancouver, Toronto, 2008, pp. 4-5.

“If, like a film, a book can have a theme song, then Faye Wong’s 1997 hit “Undercurrents”—an excerpt of which serves as the book’s epigraph—would be playing through a good part of this work.  The titular image illuminates not only the song’s theme but intriguingly also the process of its circulation and reappropriation.  Ostensibly an uncertain expression of love (the speaker desires to “hold tight” a lover but fears what may turn out to be an “empty embrace”), the song deftly entwines this personal anxiety with the political and collective—repeats itself in this “bustling city”).  A year after the song’s initial release, it was covered by Anthony Wong in a version rearranged by Keith Leung [Gaybird] and used on the soundtrack of the film Hold You Tight (Stanley Kwan, 1998).  The sexually ambivalent character of both Wong’s music (see Chapter 4) and Kwan’s film (see Chapter 1) unmoors the song from its initial context while trailing other undercurrents:  the political subtext has now acquired a sexual undertone (the uncertainty of national belonging parallels the unpredictability of desire).  Echoing the song, this book makes an implicit proposal that contemporary queer culture in Hong Kong is paradigmatic of the city’s postcolonial experience.  In contrast to the typical course of other postcolonial narratives, the putative “end” of colonialism in Hong Kong has not led to national independence but rather to an “hand-over” from one power to another without any process of self-determination among the people most directly affected. The handover is justified by a nationalist discourse of “return” (huigui) that leaves very little room for challenge or dissent.  The dictum of Hong Kong’s postcolonial governance—“One Country, Two Systems”—and the promise of “Fifty Years of No Change” have fuelled the city’s collective aspiration for regional autonomy, political democratization, and continuation of its cultural distinctiveness.”

Anthony Wong full version, live

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6cPgxR51T8