The way it works in rom coms from Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium, is in the sultry hours between dinner and the last train, the sterile glow of the chain convenience store appears like a lighthouse for working girls and their emotional crises. Millennials might have been the last generation that grew up with the idea that some conversations must be had in person, so even though it has some of the worst lighting to stage any meet-cute, break-up, or run-in with an ex, the 24-hour convenience store remains a bastion of a public space with at least one witness. Revisiting the iconic scenes in 24-hour convenience stores at the heart of Hong Kong island, the rules of romance become clear: romantic drama needs an audience, and the audience needs a place to salvage time, or kill it, or hide from it.
Love in a Puff (2007)
Jimmy and Cherie would have never met without 7-Eleven. Against the backdrop of a landmark 2007 legislation that banned indoor smoking in Hong Kong, Love in a Puff is a comedy of convenience that gives us the pairing of a reluctant couple against all odds, without any grand romantic justification. The Harbour Road 7-Eleven in Wan Chai where Jimmy and Cherie meet for the first time buying cigarettes—he is drunk; she is bored—occupies a block of nondescript, prime real estate cornered by government offices, glossy commercial buildings, and upscale restaurants—a neighbourhood so out of the way that no one really volunteers to go there without a higher force of reason.
Over the course of the film, Cherie and Jimmy’s relationship develops in different parts of the city that resemble ordinary routines—Cantonese diner, karaoke, phone bills, 7-Eleven microwave spaghetti bolognese—but made strange by the detours in their conspiracy as horny smokers trying to survive in a smoke-free world. The war on smoking is supposed to signify the progress of a modernizing city, but it has also rendered certain precariously democratized communal spaces obsolete—where else would you find a creative director, a chef, a Sephora saleswoman, and a Pakistani delivery worker fraternizing in anti-work solidarity? But even then, Love in a Puff could not have predicted that by 2024, no well-meaning romantic lead would be caught flirting with a police officer on a smoking break in a back alley.
Twelve Nights (2000)
Whether Twelve Nights is a romantic comedy would depend on which part of the movie made you laugh and which scenes play rent-free in your head after the fact. Not quite as cynical as 500 Days of Summer nor as fundamentally romantic as the Before trilogy, its hard-to-pin realism might explain why its enduring wit is unmatched even by the director Aubrey Lam’s sophomoric efforts at a sequel 23 years later in 12 Days (2022). The cyclical pattern of a relationship told over the phases of 12 nights might have even theorized hetero-fatalism before hetero-fatalism.
Twelve Nights makes you think twice before having a private conversation in a public space—the more crowded the space, the darker the comedy, the more self-conscious the audience as voyeur. The very theatrical nature of setting two narratively connected but tonally divergent break-up scenes at the 7-Eleven is emblematic of heterosexual romance as a ritualized pastime, dramatically structured by the arc of misunderstandings, arguments, and conflicts. Playing the role of the self-perfecting girlfriend—doing everything a girlfriend is supposed to do from planning the couple’s first holiday abroad to spending strenuous efforts on last-minute errands and underwear-shopping for her boyfriend Alan—Jeanie’s tragedy is not so much her desire for male validation than it is seeking validation of life from romance itself. The more she tries to prove an exception from the rule, the more she becomes doomed in the cycle of seeing coincidence as fate and fate as meaning, when what gave meaning to romance was a choice in the first place, even though she didn’t believe she was making one at the time.
The original filming location of the 7-Eleven is no longer a store, but a bank. The Sheung Wan stretch of Des Voeux Road adjacent to the party district in Central is just low-key enough for yuppies and successful bohemians. Alan, Jeanie, and their friends are always going to parties and talking on the phone, speaking in that native, colonial-educated way of adding English words to Cantonese sentences. Sometimes the English appears like daggers being pulled in the heat of the moment. That’s what Hong Kong sounds like.
Chungking Express (1994)
Because Central is not a place where normal people live, any narrative that invests too much in the neighbourhood fiction is suspect, like not worrying about rent is suspect. When I watched Chungking Express for the first time as a college student, the suggestion that a flight attendant and a police officer would share a flat in SoHo was more improbable than Faye Wong’s character’s manic pixie breaking-and-entering. And I was right to suspect: the romance of the flat next to the indelible Mid-levels Escalators was the practical result of it being cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s own home at the time.
If I was missing the point—if romance doesn’t survive for me—it was because I was too close to home. What others see as alien modernity and aporic yearning, I see unemployment crises and the administrative state: What kind of visa were Ho Po Wing and Lai Yiu Fai on in Buenos Aires all these years? What was Zhang Ziyi’s hourly rate and how did she afford the rent for room 2046? Perhaps Chow Mo Wan would’ve never taken the job in Singapore if he had more job security as a writer in Hong Kong.
In the allegorical viewing of Chungking Express as a commentary on the contrast between the cold, immensely ungraspable global supply chain (the Chungking Mansions drug trade, cop no. 663’s midnight pineapple hunt) and the well-meaning but invasive whimsy of a local business (Midnight Express), it almost didn’t matter that the convenience store in the famous pineapple scene isn’t a 7 Eleven, but a Circle K. Either way, I have never tried looking for it, for my mind has already committed one 7-Eleven location in association with Wong Kar Wai: One night, at least three iCloud password recoveries ago, a friend and I ran into Christopher Doyle at the 7-Eleven next to the Mid-levels Escalators, across from an apartment building called Soho 69. We took a selfie with Doyle in the background as he paid for a six-pack in a gray bathrobe.
The way it works in rom coms from Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium, is in the sultry hours between dinner and the last train, the sterile glow of the chain convenience store appears like a lighthouse for working girls and their emotional crises. Millennials might have been the last generation that grew up with the idea that some conversations must be had in person, so even though it has some of the worst lighting to stage any meet-cute, break-up, or run-in with an ex, the 24-hour convenience store remains a bastion of a public space with at least one witness. Revisiting the iconic scenes in 24-hour convenience stores at the heart of Hong Kong island, the rules of romance become clear: romantic drama needs an audience, and the audience needs a place to salvage time, or kill it, or hide from it.
Love in a Puff (2007)
Jimmy and Cherie would have never met without 7-Eleven. Against the backdrop of a landmark 2007 legislation that banned indoor smoking in Hong Kong, Love in a Puff is a comedy of convenience that gives us the pairing of a reluctant couple against all odds, without any grand romantic justification. The Harbour Road 7-Eleven in Wan Chai where Jimmy and Cherie meet for the first time buying cigarettes—he is drunk; she is bored—occupies a block of nondescript, prime real estate cornered by government offices, glossy commercial buildings, and upscale restaurants—a neighbourhood so out of the way that no one really volunteers to go there without a higher force of reason.
Over the course of the film, Cherie and Jimmy’s relationship develops in different parts of the city that resemble ordinary routines—Cantonese diner, karaoke, phone bills, 7-Eleven microwave spaghetti bolognese—but made strange by the detours in their conspiracy as horny smokers trying to survive in a smoke-free world. The war on smoking is supposed to signify the progress of a modernizing city, but it has also rendered certain precariously democratized communal spaces obsolete—where else would you find a creative director, a chef, a Sephora saleswoman, and a Pakistani delivery worker fraternizing in anti-work solidarity? But even then, Love in a Puff could not have predicted that by 2024, no well-meaning romantic lead would be caught flirting with a police officer on a smoking break in a back alley.
Twelve Nights (2000)
Whether Twelve Nights is a romantic comedy would depend on which part of the movie made you laugh and which scenes play rent-free in your head after the fact. Not quite as cynical as 500 Days of Summer nor as fundamentally romantic as the Before trilogy, its hard-to-pin realism might explain why its enduring wit is unmatched even by the director Aubrey Lam’s sophomoric efforts at a sequel 23 years later in 12 Days (2022). The cyclical pattern of a relationship told over the phases of 12 nights might have even theorized hetero-fatalism before hetero-fatalism.
Twelve Nights makes you think twice before having a private conversation in a public space—the more crowded the space, the darker the comedy, the more self-conscious the audience as voyeur. The very theatrical nature of setting two narratively connected but tonally divergent break-up scenes at the 7-Eleven is emblematic of heterosexual romance as a ritualized pastime, dramatically structured by the arc of misunderstandings, arguments, and conflicts. Playing the role of the self-perfecting girlfriend—doing everything a girlfriend is supposed to do from planning the couple’s first holiday abroad to spending strenuous efforts on last-minute errands and underwear-shopping for her boyfriend Alan—Jeanie’s tragedy is not so much her desire for male validation than it is seeking validation of life from romance itself. The more she tries to prove an exception from the rule, the more she becomes doomed in the cycle of seeing coincidence as fate and fate as meaning, when what gave meaning to romance was a choice in the first place, even though she didn’t believe she was making one at the time.
The original filming location of the 7-Eleven is no longer a store, but a bank. The Sheung Wan stretch of Des Voeux Road adjacent to the party district in Central is just low-key enough for yuppies and successful bohemians. Alan, Jeanie, and their friends are always going to parties and talking on the phone, speaking in that native, colonial-educated way of adding English words to Cantonese sentences. Sometimes the English appears like daggers being pulled in the heat of the moment. That’s what Hong Kong sounds like.
Chungking Express (1994)
Because Central is not a place where normal people live, any narrative that invests too much in the neighbourhood fiction is suspect, like not worrying about rent is suspect. When I watched Chungking Express for the first time as a college student, the suggestion that a flight attendant and a police officer would share a flat in SoHo was more improbable than Faye Wong’s character’s manic pixie breaking-and-entering. And I was right to suspect: the romance of the flat next to the indelible Mid-levels Escalators was the practical result of it being cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s own home at the time.
If I was missing the point—if romance doesn’t survive for me—it was because I was too close to home. What others see as alien modernity and aporic yearning, I see unemployment crises and the administrative state: What kind of visa were Ho Po Wing and Lai Yiu Fai on in Buenos Aires all these years? What was Zhang Ziyi’s hourly rate and how did she afford the rent for room 2046? Perhaps Chow Mo Wan would’ve never taken the job in Singapore if he had more job security as a writer in Hong Kong.
In the allegorical viewing of Chungking Express as a commentary on the contrast between the cold, immensely ungraspable global supply chain (the Chungking Mansions drug trade, cop no. 663’s midnight pineapple hunt) and the well-meaning but invasive whimsy of a local business (Midnight Express), it almost didn’t matter that the convenience store in the famous pineapple scene isn’t a 7 Eleven, but a Circle K. Either way, I have never tried looking for it, for my mind has already committed one 7-Eleven location in association with Wong Kar Wai: One night, at least three iCloud password recoveries ago, a friend and I ran into Christopher Doyle at the 7-Eleven next to the Mid-levels Escalators, across from an apartment building called Soho 69. We took a selfie with Doyle in the background as he paid for a six-pack in a gray bathrobe.