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Introduction
Since 1988, the year of the release of As Tears Go By, many academic texts have been written about Wong Kar-wai and his films. Among the themes dealt with are 1) Wong’s emergence from the Hong Kong cinema scene and the exceptional status he enjoys within that scene; and 2) the similarities between Wong and an extremely wide range of Western directors. The twofold concentration on Wong’s Hong Kong origins on the one hand, and his compatibility with Western cinema on the other, can be explained through Wong’s almost unique ability to make films that appear to be equally Chinese and Western, or equally local and global.1 However, in my opinion, any limitation of analysis to a dialectics of Eastern and Western elements runs the risk of bypassing by the real sources of Wong’s oeuvre. I am not aware of a single study that attempts to integrate Wong in the wide, though limited, cultural sphere of modern or post-modern East Asia. Stephen Teo points to Wong’s Asian literary influences, such as the novels of Osamu Daizai and Haruki Murakami. He even sees “a film like 2046 [as] living proof of Wong’s global and pan-Asian strategy (it features stars from all the Asian territories mentioned, while the device of having these stars speak in their own mother tongues is also part of the strategy)” (152–53). I want to extend Teo’s anticipations and explain Wong’s work by not reducing it to a selective amalgamation of “East” and “West,” but by understanding it as a phenomenon flowing out of a sphere that must be considered as having a culture of its own: the sphere of modern East Asian culture. By using this approach, I seek to avoid relativism like that expressed by Jenny Kwok who claims that “the Third World is so infiltrated with First World images and narratives that it is not possible to identify Third World ‘national’ symbolic products anymore” (22), a relativism that affirms that national characteristics do not exist at all. On the other hand, I want to avoid the essentialism that sees films and all cultural productions as expressions of national culture. Wong’s world is neither the traditional Chinese one nor the “globalized” or international one, but that of...