Summary
After Chow and Su leave the diner, they take a cab back to their building. In the cab, Chow tries to hold Su's hand, but she draws her hand away. The next scene takes place in Su's apartment, during the day. One of her housemates brings her a letter from Japan, assuming it was from Su's husband. The letter was actually for Chow, though, from his wife. The housemate brings Chow the letter, and he looks despondent when he opens it. Later, Su asks Chow about his wife being in Japan. She tells him about the letter mix-up and asks whether his wife indicated how long she would be staying in Japan. Chow replies that she did not tell him how long she'd be there. Su says, "What do you think they're doing right now?" (37:15), and Wong cuts to another sequence using the musical motif. In the sequence, Chow and Su are in the hallway of their residence. Then they're in a cab together, but before they arrive at a destination, Chow exits the cab and walks in the rain.
We jump to the same alleyway where Chow was getting rained on, but it is a sunny day, and Ping is walking into the residence. He tells Su that Chow is feeling sick, and he's picking up some food for him. Su asks what Chow would like to eat, and Ping says he can't taste anything, so he wants sesame syrup, but Ping complains that the syrup will be a bother to obtain. After Ping leaves, Su starts cooking up a pot of sesame syrup. Mrs. Suen notices and asks what it's for, and when Su claims that she just "had a sudden craving" for sesame syrup, Mrs. Suen still wonders why she would make a whole pot for herself (40:00).
Days later, Chow and Su encounter each other on the street outside of their building. Su has just come from seeing a film, and Chow is on his way to buy noodles from a street vendor. He thanks Su for the sesame syrup, and she assures him that she was making some anyway. Chow asks Su what she imagines life would be like if she hadn't gotten married, and she says she imagines she might be happier if she only had to be responsible for herself. Chow agrees that once married, his life choices were significantly restricted. He shares with Su that he's starting to write a martial arts serial for his newspaper, because it's a dream that he's neglected over the years, and he asks her to help him write it. She's hesitant, citing her lack of experience writing, but he asks her to just discuss his plots with him, and she promises to try. They part ways.
Their parting initiates another sequence using the musical motif, but this time the sequence is a montage of Chow working on his martial arts serial at the newspaper office, smoking and hunched over the typewriter, and then later showing the stories to Su over drinks in their residence. In the montage, Su (though we cannot hear the actual contents of the conversation) is clearly giving him constructive criticism as he stands by and nods, carefully considering her notes (44:30). The montage comes to an abrupt close as a scene of Chow's landlord arriving home drunk begins. Su is in Chow's room discussing the serial, and neither of them expected his housemates home so soon. Now, Su is stuck in Chow's room; she cannot leave through the house and be seen by the others, risking her reputation in the building, both of them knowing that everyone would assume something untoward was happening.
Chow goes out and gets Su and himself something to eat while she's trapped in his room. When he returns to the unit, his housemates are asking him why he's not at work, and he tells them he's not feeling well. One of his housemates tells him that if he's sick, he shouldn't be eating sticky rice, and certainly shouldn't be eating such large quantities of it. Chow says it's for later. When he returns to his room, Su asks him whether he called in sick to her job for her. Chow did, and she asks if they asked who he was. Chow assumes that they took him for her husband. Su wonders whether they are justified in being so careful, or whether they are just being overly cautious.
They remain in Chow's room all day, lounging and eating, but the mood is solemn. Su lays on Chow's bed as Chow sits at his desk. When Su returns, a housemate immediately questions why she's home so late, where she's been all day, and why she didn't see Su leave in the morning. Su explains it all away, and her housemate tells her about everyone else's day. When Su finally makes it to her room, she breathes an enormous sigh of relief and slumps down in a chair, exhausted by the constant scrutiny of her apartment. Chow is shown despondently smoking a cigarette in the hallway. A shot under his bed reveals that Su left a pair of slippers behind.
Chow and Su walk to a "special dinner" together, Chow's treat since Su refuses to accept any part of the fee he receives for publishing his martial arts serial. On the way to the restaurant, Chow tells Su that more people already want him to write for them, so there will be more work coming his way soon. Su wonders how he'll have time to accommodate the high demand, and Chow tells her that he's looking for a second place, a small apartment or room where they can work on it together. He acknowledges that there is nothing romantic between them, but that it will be easier to work together away from the prying eyes of their neighbors. Su says that he can write his serials just fine without her, so a second place would be a waste of money.
Analysis:
Su and Chow's spontaneous roleplay at the diner has evolved into an experiment that also serves as the basis for their newfound friendship. They continue to see each other to engage in a sort of morbid curiosity about their spouses' affair; their situation as both neighbors and scorned spouses—scorned by the same extramarital affair—put them in a unique position to support each other. Nobody else on earth shares what they share, brought together by this mutual pain, and that creates an intense sense of intimacy that allows them to be familiar with one another. However, this familiar intimacy is interpreted differently by Chow and Su, respectively, and in their distinct interpretations, Wong demonstrates the imbalanced intensity of society's gaze upon men versus women and the gendered restrictions imposed by the institution of marriage.
In the wake of their spouses' infidelity, both Chow and Su see opportunities. Both consider how marriage has changed their lives and added restrictions, obligations, and not necessarily welcomed responsibilities that have prevented them from pursuing their passions or even just simply being mindful of their own needs and desires—about this, Chow and Su clearly agree. Where they diverge is in their preferred paths forward; this divergence is explored when they encounter each other in the street near their building. Chow is on his way to the noodle cart, and Su is returning home from a movie. He asks her to join him for dinner, and she declines. Chow remarks that he used to enjoy going to the movies, but suggests that since he got married, he's less able to do things he used to enjoy. "On your own, you are free to do lots of things," he says (40:41). "Everything changes when you get married. You must decide together. Right?" He pauses to wait for Su's response, but she simply nods in agreement. Chow then says, "I sometimes wonder what I'd be like if I hadn't married. Have you ever thought of that?"
Su considers for a moment before she says, "Happier, maybe?" They continue walking as Su expands on her initial response. She discusses how complicated married life is versus living as a single person. "When you're single," she says, "you are only responsible to yourself. Once you're married, doing well on your own is not enough" (41:18). Here is where Chow's response distils the essential disconnect in how each of them view this juncture in their married lives: when Su asks Chow the same question, he says, "Actually, we're in the same boat. But I don't brood on it. It's not my fault. I can't waste time wondering if I made mistakes. Life's too short for that. Something must change." As he says this, he advances toward Su. It's important to note a previous scene, in which Chow attempts to hold Su's hand in the cab and she pulls away. Chow exits the cab before it reaches the building, so as to avoid suspicion if any of their housemates were to see them exiting a cab together, but on his walk home, he's caught in a rainstorm. The rain emphasizes the pain Chow feels from his rejection and also plays into the new narrative he's spinning about his relationship to Su: that this is the start of something new and fresh, something for which he's willing to make sacrifices.
However, Su doesn't reciprocate Chow's feelings. Su's response to considering what life would have been like had she not gotten married focuses on independence and autonomy. Chow's focuses instead on blame and codependency. While Su considers the potential happiness that would come from not being married, Chow considers the potential happiness that would come from not being married to his wife. His affections are now focused on Su, while Su considers the joy that would be only having to worry about herself and not being scrutinized and judged by others in terms of whether they believe she's being a "good wife." The irony of this scrutiny she's subject to is of course that her husband is the unfaithful one.
There are aspects of the relationship with Chow that clearly appeal to Su. After all, if the film suggests anything about Su's life, it is that she leads an extremely lonely existence. This is another important distinction between Chow and Su, and one that is also a symptom of the way gender inscribes expectations into their respective roles in society. Chow has friends from work. He has familiar male relationships where he can discuss sensitive personal matters. Su doesn't have that. She's not shown to have any friends of any gender. The women in her life, the women she lives with, and the parasocial relationships she maintains with her boss's wife and mistress, all feed into her (and in the case of her boss's wife and mistress, their) oppression at the hands of patriarchy. So, with Chow, the prospect of a friendship and relationship of equals appeals to Su. When Chow invites her to work on a martial arts serial with him, he's showing that he trusts and respects her as an equal. Regardless of whether or not Su has even shades of romantic interest in Chow, Chow fails to understand why she would not want to act on those feelings, because he faces far less scrutiny that Su. Nobody wonders where he goes at night, or why he's home late.
The montage of Chow and Su hunched over, working on the serial, exemplifies a partnership of equals. However, in the course of their work, Su finds herself in Chow's room when Chow's housemates unexpectedly return home from dinner one night. Both Su and Chow panic and decide that Su should stay in his room until the others go to bed and she can slip out unnoticed. They stay in the room all day. Chow comes and goes as needed to bring them food, and Su lounges in his bed, solemn and feeling trapped (46:00 – 49:00). They discuss the circumstances, and Su eventually suggests that maybe they were being too cautious and should not have panicked, because, after all, there's nothing happening between them. Chow rebuts by pointing out that they were home alone and not expecting the others to return, so the others could easily jump to the conclusion that something romantic was happening. It's clear that Chow is more comfortable in the situation, and that perhaps he's even enjoying it, given that he's able to spend time with Su in the particularly intimate setting of his bedroom. Su, on the other hand, feels and literally is trapped. While Chow has the freedom to come and go, Su is forced to stay, or else risk judgement. The scenario perfectly portrays their dynamic: Chow enjoys autonomy and sees a future with Su, whereas Su recognizes that despite getting along well with Chow, she would still lack autonomy in a romantic engagement with him.
When Su finally returns home, Wong returns to a recurring visual motif on restriction, this time framing a sustained shot on Su from outside her bedroom window. Su sits behind her window, behind the grid of its frame, which looks unmistakably like the bars of a cage (50:25 – 50:47).
