A Contemplation on Fallen Angels (1995)

Writing and Graphics by Anonymous

The agent is someone you’d call a cool girl. Shiny leather, fishnets, red lipstick. Bangs that look so good it makes you want to get the same haircut. Ignore the higher maintenance, ignore the thought she can’t possibly see with her hair in her face like that. She’s the type of cool girl that starry-eyed ten-year-old me hoped puberty would be kind enough to let her become.

And you would think for someone so cool, I’d want to actually be her instead of just like her. But I don’t, not even for a second. Because she is so unbearably lonely that it feels like a death sentence. Like every time she takes a drink at the bar alone, it feels like she’ll choke on her own loneliness.

A film about lonely people that is set in the night cityscape of Hong Kong, as much of a character as any of the friendless, loveless people on the screen. I am more than familiar with these kinds of cities and the characters they serve as a background to. 

A witness to the shouting, drunk uncles in Vietnam with their shirts pulled over their stomach, drinking weak beer. I’ve always been partial to hard liquor myself, alcohol meant to be enjoyed with friends in apartment parties, not dinners at street food stalls with the adult relatives. I always strived to maintain quieter, intimate settings I could never find in family settings, simmering just below raucous.

A witness to ladies, young and middle-aged alike, shouting, relationship drama in the open. I think about Karen Mok’s character Blondie, a bleached and permed primadonna, who bites only so she can be remembered.

Grungy streets and dirty asphalt and neon lights and feeling alive on the back of a motorcycle in ways life in any American city could never replicate. 

But that’s not home.

I can’t help but relate with my own slightly different flavor of loneliness, an Asian-American unable to feel at home in her mother country. I think about the woman who raised me. How the aftertaste of a war still lingers on my mother’s tongue the way her mother tongue continued to fade to make room for the American dream. My beautiful, distant mother. 

I can pretend as much as I want. It’s more than being unable to drive a motorcycle, it’s more than the language barrier. I think about loneliness, a quiet thing, an ugly thing, like there’s a target painted on my back screaming that I am destined to be alone, whether by choice or not. The unrelatable shame of cycling through a second, third language to process an “I love you.” Having to forget English, having to forget even words as the default. Not feeling the sentiment no matter how I give it back.

Takeshi Kaneshiro’s mute character might relate to this wordless sentiment. Only given a voice through narration, affection given through being the director of home videos starring his father until he passes away.

I’ve never been to a funeral. There’s a cemetery next to a high school near me I didn’t go to. On the rare drives down that road, my father tells me more about his first job cleaning headstones, revealing the grief I usually saw tucked behind closed doors, almost swept under the carpet. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of his younger self out the window. I heard about my resemblance to him growing up, how I have his eyes, his nose, his quiet demeanor. I don’t see it sometimes, don’t want to see it sometimes. I worry about inheriting his grief. I worry about not inheriting his grief. I worry that family is supposed to mean something, more than it actually does to me.

Fallen Angels, best enjoyed in a dark childhood bedroom with dim light emanating from a laptop screen. The sole light source you have after realizing home isn’t the mother country nor is it the people you’re supposed to love.