Featured in
Honeymoon,
Volume 11, Issue 02,
Yale Paprika 2024
1. Changzhou, China
At the age of 12, hiding beneath my winter blanket, I watched Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together for the first time—on the five-inch screen of my MP4 player. Starring two A-list Sinosphere actors, the Cannes-winning film delivered a powerful shock—one that gave every coming-of-age Chinese gay boy a raw education in inaccessible love.
The film begins with the collapse of a couple’s honeymoon. What was intended to be a road trip to Iguaçu Falls goes awry. Two Hong Kong men, Lai Yiu-Fai and Ho Po-Wing, were stranded in Buenos Aires. Lai scraped by being a doorman for a tango bar, while Po worked as a midnight cowboy, only to return to Lai’s dingy one-room apartment, penniless and badly beaten, seeking truce with Lai.
I was still too young to fully grasp the intricate emotions and love’s push and pull depicted in the film, but that night, I dreamed of Iguaçu Falls.
2. Copenhagen, Denmark
I didn’t get to revisit Happy Together until almost a decade later. Jørgen and I watched it together at his flat.
“What do you like most about the film?” I asked him.
“The lamp as a thread of their love.”
Lai and Ho bought a glowing paper lamp, kitschy in a way, with a colorful painting of the majestic Iguaçu Falls on its shade. Enticed by it, they had planned to visit the falls upon arriving in Buenos Aires. However, after losing their direction, money, and relationship, the lamp became a bittersweet time capsule of their imagined honeymoon.
“The idea of two Asian exiles struggling with their break-ups in different ways, in a Spanish-speaking continent, is also very new and fascinating,” Jørgen continued.
“Exiles? More like immigrants or expatriates…” I might have been offended by his choice of words, likely because of my own status as an expat in his country. I was overly sensitive when it came to transnational bodies.
I met Jørgen at a work party, where we initially debated Dogme 95 and later discovered our shared obsession with Wong Kar-Wai’s melancholy dramas. We were passing by each other’s lives briefly; we knew each other pretty well; we knew nothing about each other.
Jørgen’s flat was near Søerne Lake. Through the thick night air, I gazed out to where the lake flowed like dark China ink, catching the faint glow of lights from the old city center. Copenhagen is a place where you feel lonely too easily.
3. Vancouver, Canada
Alejandro and I moved into our Gastown apartment at the height of the pandemic. Happy Together was the first film we watched there. Alejandro is Mexican; he likes frying cacti as snacks before watching movies.
During one of the few happy moments Lai and Ho shared after making up, Ho taught Lai how to dance. They moved, harmoniously and flirtatiously, to the melancholic notes of Astor Piazzolla’s “Tango Apasionado,” turning a squalid communal kitchen into their quasi-honeymoon.
“So… are we happy together?” Alejandro asked me after the film, with a nervous smirk.
“I think so,” I answered, in a firm tone but with a burgeoning reservation I decided to overlook.
Gastown is a neighborhood of disarray—part tourist spectacle, part urban grit. Boutique storefronts glow with warm light, while just a few paces away, unhoused residents shout over traffic and drunk tourists vomit onto the cobblestone pavement, glasses occasionally shattering from a bar down the block. Amid that chaos, Alejandro’s and my anticipation for life slowly faded—the chaos must have permeated into our relationship as well. Together, we livened up the empty apartment, bought each piece of furniture we both liked, and eventually emptied it again.
When I sentimentally reminisce after we broke up, he always laughs and says we always have those days in us—that all we’ve lost was their continuity.
4. San Diego, the USA
Lev is a dear friend, but he lives far away in California, and we only see each other once a year.
We talk on the phone often, though. Once, while I was working on a deadline, he was watching Happy Together with his girlfriend, we kept the call open. The soundtrack and fragmented dialogue drifted from San Diego to me.
Lai Yiu-Fai: “Hey! What do you think you’re doing… You have your own bed…”
Ho Po-Wing: “我鍾意呀 / I like yours!”
Later, Lev texted me: “I like the original title of the film in Chinese better—春光乍泄—A Sudden Burst of Spring.”
5. Vancouver, Canada
When I returned to Vancouver after moving away for graduate school, I stumbled upon the Cinematheque showing a restored 4K version of Happy Together. There was no reason for me not to step inside.
“Let’s start over”—Ho Po-Wing’s mantra, a lethal incantation that forever drew Lai Yiu-Fai into endless loops of separation, pain, and temporary reconciliation.
By the film’s end, Lai arrived and stood before Iguaçu Falls alone—his slim, solitary silhouette overwhelmed by the belittling grandeur of nature’s wonder. The falls cascaded like a thousand roaring floods from the sky. “I feel sad. There should be two of us standing here,” Lai said. Iguaçu—once the long-desired honeymoon destination—lost its magic when it revealed its physical form, no longer just an over-saturated print on Ho’s rotating lampshade. The essence of a honeymoon lies not in its place-ness, but in the shared dream of it with someone.
MINUTE 04:31
Lai: “¿Dónde es Iguaçu?”
A honeymoon is, by nature, ephemeral. It is a fleeting thought that flows across the map of your mind; it is a momentary intimacy between one human and another. I keep wondering, how often do we truly get the chance to start over?
Walking alone on Vancouver’s streets, those spoken words of my past fade into silence—my Iguaçu Falls torrents restlessly through the uncharted dreamscape of Argentina; don’t cry for me.