Elva Hsiao appeared in Infernal Affairs for just a few minutes — a cultural icon's finishing touch on a film and an era. I don't remember when I first saw it, but whenever it was, it completed the image of Elva Hsiao: on a Hong Kong street, on one side, a son of the underworld; on the other, a carefree, emotionally uninvested daughter of the metropolis, named May. She is Hong Kong — the Hong Kong that calls itself an international financial center — and also New York, the New York of Fifth Avenue (where she goes by Elva). She asks Chan Wing-yan (who looks a lot like Tony Leung): "Still running with the gangs?"
This is a parable of the age. One Hong Kong is asking another. One Hong Kong is the Central District, forever ablaze with light to serve the different time zones of the global village. The other Hong Kong is the local Hong Kong of Causeway Bay — the Hong Kong of mainlanders, Guan Gong, and Young and Dangerous gangsters — a Hong Kong that, no matter how rich, lives like rats in darkness. In that Hong Kong, a son named Ngai Wing-hau tries to legitimize his family; another son named Chan Wing-yan forsakes the dark for the light. Central's glamorous daughter asks Causeway Bay's bedraggled son: still running with the gangs? It's nearly 1997 — the colonial era is about to end — and perhaps the two Hong Kongs will finally become one, as Man Chi-leung hinted in another film. How are you still running with the gangs? And May glances at the camera — she seems to know that the tides of history will mercilessly wash away all the sorrow in the frame.
Yes — this is a daughter of one Hong Kong and a son of another. They once loved each other, once were intimate, perhaps once were angry and wounded. She is sincere, she cares — but her question carries a sting of irony, not in tone, but in the situation itself. She walks briskly through the crowded streets carrying her daughter, heading toward that other Hong Kong. The daughter is his — theirs — but she won't let him know.
In those minutes, May looks exactly like Elva on the cover of Fifth Avenue, holding an enormous yellow pay phone, with no clue whom she might be calling. I think the director was looking for exactly the Elva who makes phone calls on Fifth Avenue, even though you can never imagine who she'd be calling. Hong Kong's May is that beautiful, that urban, that breezy and self-sufficient — a psychiatrist working in a gorgeous glass office. There is no essential difference between her and New York's Elva.
Such a ruthless, independent woman — you might brush past her on the street, but she's only passing through. Even if she's carrying the daughter she had with you, she won't let you know. She says goodbye, then, cold as stone, hammers her high heels — click, click — into the pavement, walking toward her impregnable, eternally self-revolving orbit. Without exaggeration, without Elva Hsiao's few minutes, Infernal Affairs would be incomplete — it would fail to depict colonial-era Hong Kong, the love between two Hong Kongs, and their daughter. But equally, without those few minutes, Elva Hsiao herself would be incomplete — without them, we'd still think she was truly nothing more than a carefree, heartless independent woman.
Honestly, watching that scene, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The masculine pride so deeply bruised in adolescence found a measure of restoration: sure, she looks cold and heartless — as if she could end a relationship tonight, have one last night of tenderness, and tomorrow fly silently back to New York to go to work "steady as iron," then hit the luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue for a shopping spree. But she's a single mother! She had a child with one of us street thugs (well, actually, we're undercover cops)! Maybe she doesn't love us, but she still needs us — at least to father children!
It is now 2025. China has 54 cities with metro or light rail systems. But 22 years ago, in 2003 — the year remembered for SARS and Faye Wong's last album — China had only four cities with metros: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. On December 30, 2003, Elva Hsiao released her album Fifth Avenue.
Imagine a teenage boy in a small county town in southern Shaanxi, more than twenty years ago, hearing "Subway" for the first time. It was a song on Fifth Avenue; the cover showed a distant, beautiful woman holding an enormous yellow pay phone, with no idea whom she might call — her image and voice so independent it seemed she would never call anyone. The cassette may have had a sash with promotional copy — something nonsensical, bewildering: "Life sometimes resembles the subway — the next stop may be where your dreams begin… Standing on Fifth Avenue, Elva uses music to realize her original dream, sharing it with you." Sharing with whom? Sharing what?
All of it was at once awe-inspiring and unsettling — not only because of the unreachable, incomprehensible remoteness of the subway and Fifth Avenue, but because of the crisp, free voice that came through the Walkman and MP3 player. Elva Hsiao is a singular artist. Almost solely through image and voice, she became herself: no matter how much fragility, longing, and loss the lyrics expressed, what she sang was always clean-cut and free. The love and sorrow she sang were like remembering on Monday morning a sunset you saw on Sunday evening — lovely, melancholic, but also something you could bear, even enjoy, every weekend.
Listening to those songs, a scene materialized in the boy's mind: the melody ends, and Elva changes into leather pants, tosses her hair, and strides off to her next date. Every man she dates has a distinctive face, yet they're all interchangeable. No matter who it is, she remains that heartless love-player, Elva Hsiao — sexy, free, independent. No matter which man she'd been intimate with the night before, behind her there always runs a life-system operating as usual, brooking no emotional disruption. That is the artist Elva Hsiao — and in all these decades there has been only one like her.
In the world of the artist Elva Hsiao, what should a man be? The boy couldn't figure it out. He was supposed to grow naturally into a natural man — a man whom women depended on, and who, because he was depended on, was philosophically dependent on women in return — for his very manhood lay in being depended on (emotionally). If women stopped depending on men — if they were happy without feeling, sad without feeling, living their own emotionally rich lives without feeling — then the man the boy was supposed to become could not exist. And who, then, was the boy supposed to become? Who else was there to become?
Perhaps it is exactly this challenge to existential meaning that is causing the Elva Hsiao who was Elva Hsiao to fade out; new Elva Hsiaos are ever rarer. I imagine that many years from now, there may be a boy born in a big city with a metro system, who visited Fifth Avenue as a child. Hearing Elva Hsiao would feel perfectly natural to him, because it is natural. And when he looks back at the world that made Elva Hsiao seem so extraordinary — our world — he might say: the happiness of men and women depending on each other was precisely the source of all the fragility, longing, and unease in Elva Hsiao's lyrics. Men and women could live as heartlessly and painlessly as Elva Hsiao performs on stage. Even though life is ultimately painful and arduous, it could at least be a different kind of pain and hardship.
But I also know: the boy I imagine may never exist. Recalling the glimmers of the early century, the future unfurled before us in ways both thrilling and unsettling. We thought it was the beginning of a beginning; in fact, it was the end of a peak. The world did not open up in the blaze of glory it had promised — instead, it seemed to recoil, slowly closing like a spring pushed too far. On the scale of history, the tide will return, bringing the scent of a distant shore's future. But for one generation, the future seems to have ebbed beyond recall. We are like undercover agents who mistake ourselves for police, still harboring sadness and illusions of a future yet remaining when we see May on the street. She walks past with her daughter, and we don't know the daughter is ours, nor that this is the end of the world.
And when the boy of the early century finally understands those few minutes of Infernal Affairs, finally knows why he loves the artist Elva Hsiao — he also finally knows that this Elva Hsiao is not real. It is a brilliant performance she gave us. We don't know her private life, but she is perhaps, like everyone, a person who longs to be free of pain. Performing painlessness for our generation, she deceived us — not because she enjoyed the deception, but because we needed to be deceived. We needed a heartless, painless icon, and she — not only in her art, but in the life she laid bare before the public — generously gave us that painless image. She fooled us all — just as she acted out in Infernal Affairs: on the surface she was Elva Hsiao, but in truth, she was May.
Yes — yes, it's true — it wasn't real. That Elva Hsiao wasn't real. Her independence, her freedom, her heartlessness, her painlessness — none of it was real.
But it was what we loved.