Ana Paulina Lee

Corridor of Consumption: The Gaze of Modern Day China through Hong Kong Cinema

Aboard the train of thought a passenger paces down the corridor of the impending towards the irrecoverable; the traveler comes from the future and is heading towards a forgotten history. The year 2046 is like a blueprint for memory; it is a vast circuitry of structures, weaving roadways, intricate passageways and unrecalled alleys. Skyscrapers have no ground level; transit arteries have no origin or destination. On the train from the future, aesthetically perfect female androids have replaced their human counterparts. They have delayed emotional response, when they are sad they cry a day later signaling that they are about to break down. The female beings in 2046 by Wong Kar Wai cannot experience immediate sensations. They are aesthetically perfect beings that meet the criteria of society’s gaze, but their emotions have been evacuated. Forever young and eternally attractive, the women of Fruit Chan’s Dumplings abide by the code of the gaze, which drives them to ceaselessly desire the ideal image; they will stop at nothing to achieve perfection. They become externally flawless by way of restructuring moral and ethical boundaries. Female sexuality, in both films, becomes defined by a certain kind of melancholia. By analyzing how symptoms of melancholia manifest and then structure the gaze in the films 2046 and Dumplings, we will elucidate a portrait of the social and psychic domains framed by political and historical occurrences in the 20th Century that mark an end of history in the coming of China.

Ana Paulina Lee received her BA from SUNY Binghamton in English Literature and an MA from NYU in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Southern California. Her comparatist work explores passages (literary, historical, and voyages) to and from the Americas, the Iberian Peninsula, and East Asia. She is interested in hybrid cultures and identities and their appearances in visual and performance arts.