In Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), people are frequently at play. Whether it’s billiards, baseball, mahjong, street gambling, swimming, drinking games, or pulling pranks and goofing off at work, people treat life like a game. The titular boys are provincial hooligans from a small fishing village in the Penghu Islands, where there isn’t much to do except horse around. We first see them playing billiards in a pool hall by the sea. The balls map out the trajectories of their lives—at times they sit about, at others they are launched into chaos, colliding with each other and the limits of their world before coming to rest again. Someone shoots, and a ball goes flying off the pool table.
As a director who depicted social transformations through the punctum of ordinary lives, Hou recognized the power of play to generate the kinds of moments that lodge in the mind long after they pass. When we play, we form a magic circle, a space of ritual within which we can enter into an informal sociality with strangers, and contest fate itself. Hou has filmed many scenes of play (and leisure in general) throughout his career, from the antics of the children in A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) to those of petty gangsters in Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). The Boys from Fengkuei is the first film where he elevates them to a heretofore unseen narrative significance. The opening sequence, in which the boys spray beer onto some poor sap in a toilet stall, repeats in different ways with increasing violence, as the boys piss off more and more people who gang up on them in return. After a nasty street fight, they’re hauled off to the police and forced to pay the medical bills of the guys they beat up. There is no hard line between inconsequential fun and a life-changing event. The gravitas of a situation can shift suddenly and unexpectedly; someone might experience things the former way, and the person next to them the latter.
One of the boys, Ah-ching (Doze Niu), has internalized this truth. As a child, he saw his father get his skull caved in by an errant baseball pitch that left him mentally disabled. Ah-ching is the only character whose memories are shown in flashbacks, and is a conduit through which an ancestral heritage enters the frame. He emerges as the most taciturn and mature of the boys. Needing money, and feeling like it’s time to grow up, they ship off to the busy port city of Kaohsiung to find a job. In their apartment, Ah-ching studies Japanese while the others chomp sugarcane and distract him, and kicks out some new friends after they make a dirty joke about their neighbor’s girlfriend, Hsiao-hsing (Lin Hsiu-ling), who Ah-ching has a crush on. Like a seasoned gambler who remembers the numerous hands he and others have been dealt, he seems to consider the past to find a way forward whereas the other boys rush headfirst into the urban jungle and its thorns. Near the beginning of the film, Ah-ching overhears his mother betting on a game. “To win, you have to play like grandma,” she remarks.
Despite his self-awareness, Ah-ching doesn’t cash out that much. Tragedy strikes when his father dies and he has to return home for the funeral. Hsiao-hsing accompanies him. Their temperaments are similar, but she is more prone to worry. Her boyfriend, Chin-ho (Tuo Tsung-hua), steals parts from the factory where the boys work, and she thinks he’ll be found out. Like Ah-ching, she conjures the past when confronting the future, praying at a temple to receive Chin-ho’s fortune. She later reads it for him: “Wind and rain. Disaster brings injury. Success is unlikely.” The stubborn Chin-ho explodes at her, berating her concern. But Hsiao-hsing is proven right and Chin-ho is nearly arrested. He finds a new job on a ship and leaves Taiwan. For Hsiao-hsing, it’s dangerous to chance fate—the house always wins. But she and Ah-ching, like everyone else, have to keep spinning the wheel of fortune. After the funeral, they play a carnival game at a night market back in Kaohsiung that involves shooting pool balls. Ah-ching wins, Hsiao-hsing doesn’t. But the outcome isn’t important. After such dramatic finality, they both keep playing, trying again.
Allow me to share a short story, The New and the Old, by the Chinese writer Shen Congwen, one of Hou’s foremost literary inspirations. In late Qing-dynasty China, a young executioner carries out his job professionally, and beheading criminals is an unremarkable part of his life. After every execution, he performs a ritual at a temple to atone for his act before the gods. This too was part of the performance of justice—a way of conveying to the public the seriousness of killing. Yet after it’s all over, the executioner and his friends joke around and banter about it, mimicking the ritual and making a game of it. Much later, the executioner is a retired old man living quietly in the new Republic. There is no use for him, as people are now executed by firing squad. One day, he is shocked to receive an urgent order to execute someone. He can hardly believe it and is so bewildered he wonders if he’s dreaming. When he gets to the execution site, he finds a young man and woman kneeling on the ground. He beheads them, still not thinking what is happening is real, and spirals further into delirium. He runs to the temple to perform the ritual, but it has not been done in a long time. No one remembers it even existed. The temple-goers flee in terror from the deluded old man. He later learns something like a cruel joke was played on him by local military officials, who used him to execute two Communists the old way to make a gruesome example of them.
The interactions between play, rituals, history, and the everyday animate both Shen’s story and The Boys from Fengkuei. Everyone is that bewildered executioner, forever players in a game that is a matter of life and death in a reality that feels like a game. Memory and tradition guide us in the present and help us rationalize our decisions, but are poor insurance against the future’s vast unknowns. And we often don’t realize how serious it all is until it’s too late. By the end of the film, Hsiao-hsing is on a bus bound for Taipei, leaving both Chin-ho and Ah-ching behind. Maybe she realizes that she can’t remain afraid of taking risks of her own. After seeing her off, Ah-ching joins the rest of the boys, who are selling music cassettes from a little stand in the street. Business is a bit slow. Soon, one of the boys, Kuo-zai (Chao Peng-chue), will join the military. All around Ah-ching, people are departing—the pool balls are jumping the edge of the table. His core friend group is about to be broken up. And what does he do? He gets on a stool and starts boisterously and comically hawking the rest of the tapes, trying to sell as much as possible. Again—and certainly not for the last time—he turns his life into a game.
The Boys from Fengkuei screens this evening, January 8, at Asia Society on 35mm as part of the series “Films to See Before You Die.” Screenwriter Chu T’ien-wen will introduce the film in a specially recorded video.
