2. Starlight
******* woman Sam was told to call Ayi was by all appearances a run-of-the-mill Beijing mom. But she reminded him of the poetic lady gangster in a movie that set his adolescent heart alight.
In Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express, Lin Qingxia portrays a mobster who for Sam was like living verse. She is surrounded by trash. Her white mob boss boyfriend is a shadowy marionette who casts her like a stringed puppet into a treacherous underworld of drugs and violence. He is cheating on her with a bar-back floozy. Lin’s character wears a blonde wig, sunglasses, and a raincoat. She is unknowable. She is also deliciously indifferent — unimpressed by life, even at its most precarious. There is a dignity in her nonchalance. She cares to live, or she would not run as she does from he
