In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

The story of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) seems simple enough at the outset: a handsome soldier stationed in a rural community on the edge of the forest in northern Thailand meets a young village man. Their lives are by and large carefree, filled with an innocence that feels entirely fitting with the peace and splendor of the countryside around them—the tawny deciduous jungle punctuated with lakes and rolling grassland, the mountains that stretch to Laos and Myanmar in the distance. They listen to pop music, stroll around the night market in the small local town, visit cave temples, spend quiet afternoons sheltering from rainstorms in a sala overlooking a tranquil pond. They fall in love.

Though they never manage to articulate their emotions, we are left in little doubt as to how they feel about each other after an hour of slow-burn desire, during which Tong, the younger, more inexperienced of the two, begins to figure out that this new relationship is not quite the laddish one he expected it to be. Keng, the soldier, is much more direct, familiar with same-sex relationships and comfortable in his queer masculine identity. (In one of their outings to the local town, he flashes a knowing smile at the buff aerobics instructor conducting public classes in the main square, a brief half-second that carries the weight of a whole history of off-camera, off-script liaisons.) But even as he courts Tong in an almost old-fashioned, mostly nonsexual manner, it’s clear that he has never before been in such a position of vulnerability. His longing for Tong is new and unknown. At the end of one long dreamy evening together, they finally express their physical desire by kissing each other’s hands—in fact not just kissing but licking, gnawing, each almost eating the other man’s fist. As Keng rides home, the night seems magical and unending, filled with color and music.

And then, the night is over.

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In Tash Aw’s new column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

Still from Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together”

In the summer of 1997 I was living in London, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’d left college and had been in the city for a year, trying, like so many other twentysomethings, to write a novel. I’d given myself a year, but as the chapters took shape so did a curious tension about the way my life was playing out. Part of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people—my people—that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider.

But the increasing clarity of all this was troubled by a growing unsettledness: I had imagined that the act of writing my country and people into existence would make me feel closer to them, but instead I felt more distant. The physical separation between me and my family in Malaysia, which had, up to then, been a source of liberation, now created a deep anxiety. All of a sudden I saw the huge gulf between the person I had been and the one I now was. In the space of just five or six years, university education had given me a different view of life, a different appreciation of its choices. My tastes had evolved, the way I used language had changed—not just in terms of syntax and grammar but the very fact that standard English was now my daily language, rather than the rich mixture of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Malaysian slang that I had used exclusively until the age of eighteen. I was writing about the place I was from, about the people I loved (and hated), but felt a million miles from them.

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