Those Who Ended Up Here 

Chiarina Chen 

In watching Mabel Cheung’s Illegal Immigrant for the first time forty years after it was made, I lingered on a thought — people ended up in America. Decade after decade, people ended up here. They did and they still do.

I don’t feel like using the word ‘come’ to describe going to the US. People ‘come to,’ or ‘go to,’ the US for a dream, they end up there in reality. Illegal Immigrant is in tune with the latter, the reality, the ended-up. It gestures toward to a sense of adrift-ness rather than certainty.

What happens when you end up in the US, illegally? The storyline itself is not so complicated. It follows an undocumented protagonist, Cheung Kwan-chow (Chow), who ended up in New York, and in order to survive and get a green card, he enters into a fake marriage with the female lead, Cindy Li (Cindy). They ended up in love. Cindy dies.

As precarious as one could imagine, the film is not about struggle. You won’t see anyone who suffers, resists, fights his way out of the predicament and claims a sort of victory. What we see, from the very beginning, is a suspended state of a person with no legal status: his time paused, out of sync with the mainstream. There’s no difference between today and tomorrow. He exists, in the shadow. It’s a man not without agency, but who drifts within his limitations. This limitation, of course, also includes language and therefore his areas of life.

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The relationship arc is both realistic and ideal. Realistic because it’s a fake marriage in exchange for a green card. Ideal because, despite the big discrepancy and cultural tensions between the Chow and Cindy, they managed to reconcile their differences and see each other’s true self.

Despite having no legal status, and constantly having to respond passively to one problem after another—entering a fake marriage, finding work, learning English, paying back gang debts— Chow is not consumed by anxiety or self-denigration. For him, they were all at most just a kind of trouble. The day after being released from the detention center, he already has a new job at a restaurant, playfully punching slabs of hanging meat as if they were a boxing bag. He is, if anything, quite optimistic.

The female lead, Cindy, by contrast, embodies a second-generation Chinese American who has embraced American culture. She is chic, speaks fluent English, and desires the high-bridged nose

shaped by Western aesthetics. Wherever she appears, space seems opens up, too: the Atlantic city beach, Fifth Avenue, Niagara Falls. Her presence feels like a door for Chow, offering a solution to his legal status as well as access to a world beyond his limitations.

This relationship started out radically equal precisely because the marriage is fake. Money in exchange for a green card, purely transactional. Despite the significant gap between the two, Chow does not carry a sense of inferiority. He is not self effacing; he is not diminished by the difference. Cindy, on the other hand, is the anxious one—unsure about her appearance, often in need of affirmation, and also the guilty one—for not helping out in Chow’s immigration process after she took the money. Their argument down Broadway Ave makes the two feel equally strong and hurt. One accuses the other of not speaking English and being a jerk; the other fires back that she does not speak Chinese and is a ‘八婆’ (baatpo)

Paradoxically, this form of equality, based on a fake marriage and hence the ‘spirit of contract’, allows Cindy to recognize something in Chow that she truly admires: his will to a good life, his mysterious past, his bravery in chasing down the theft and getting her money back, and his steady hand when extracting bullets out ofher little brother.

I laughed so hard at the wedding ceremony scene . Chow mimicking Cindy’s crossed fingers (a gesture meant to ward off telling the truth) was hilarious. I have personally attended many city hall ceremonies for friends, and I remembered myself at the altar during my own, being nervous even though it was not fake. That was hilarious, too. I was nervous not because of the nature of my marriage, which is irrelevant, but because of the proofing process - how do you prove to them that it’s real?

It has long been rumored that immigration officers will interview the couple, asking about the color of underwear and bra, along with every detail of each other’s likes and dislikes. In my own immigration process, I’ve never been asked about the color of underwear so far, though seeing this ‘legendary’ question on screen put me in awe, mixed with the bittersweet realization that it has been this way since the 1980s and that it is still haunting us today.

Not having a green card means you’ll have to prepare everything for suspicion, at all times. Take pictures. Tons of them. Live together, do taxes together, buy things together. It’s a prolonged bureaucratic process that treats everyone as a natural suspect. Gather as much evidence as you can. It’s never innocent till proven fake. It’s all fake till proven real.

Seldom do we see a fake marriage process rendered in such detail in a film. And just like being an illegal immigrant, one cannot reduce a fake marriage to mere legal and moral judgment. At least a film can do more than just that, showing us that even in the illegal, the fake, the shadow, there’s a huge spectrum of?, mixed with calculation and care, shame and trust, despair and earnest hope.

Even though Chow appears composed on the surface, Cheung approaches the character with a subtle feminine sensitivity. The only two moments in the film where our male protagonist’s loneliness and vulnerability are allowed to surface are both seen through Cindy’s perspective. One is the moment when Chow walks away alone, his back turned to us, after helping Cindy subdue a thug; the other is when Cindy watches him through a window, holding his books as he goes to lessons by himself. It is precisely in these moments that we glimpse a side of him he does not reveal anywhere else. This unguarded vulnerability, seen by Cindy, allows her, and us the audience, to empathize with him more deeply.

I wonder if their relationship had begun with genuine romantic interest rather than a sham marriage, would they have arrived at marriage at all? Would Chow still be this relaxed, this free of self-doubt? Perhaps it would be the case of Autumn’s Tale, where Chow Yun-fat’s character and the female lead are drawn to each other, yet choose to conceal their feelings in the face of an overwhelming disparity.

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With the characters’ status suspended and adrift, the only thing that remains solidly grounding throughout is place — Chinatown. The sensorial density captured by the film genuinely preserves the texture of Chinatown in the 1980s. It is a self-made world, one with its own emotional texture.

Many of the migrants we see in the film are like Chow, comingfrom Hong Kong or mainland China, likely arriving through the large waves of migration between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution. After crossing the ocean, people keep each other warm in Chinatown, offering help and forming connections, often without the need to interact with mainstream White society. Gangs rise from within; even White police officers are intimidated and pushed back. The film’s final gunfight scene also emerges from the internal conflicts among Chinese gangs, rather than from external forces.

Chinatown may appear separate from mainstream American society, but it possesses a deeply immanent form of life. It is hybrid. Relational. Constantly forming itself. The film’s quiet power lies here, too. It treats Chinatown as a living thing, like a porous body.

We are naturally drawn into Chow’s life as the camera traces the routes he drifts along, the everyday places he enters and exits, and the different ways of living that unfold around him. The lens moves back and forth between neon signage, streets, plazas, and cramped interiors: arcades, gambling halls, video rental shops, apartments. Steam rises now and then. You could smell the food, feel the burning heat of the machines. Interiors are always crowded, hazy; exteriors are often damp. And he is always in slippers.

The most unforgettable scene for me is the immigration inspection at the couple’s apartment. Frogs leap across the room, their wet bodies slapping the floor, their croaks colliding with the immigration officer’s questions. The moment is absurd, tense, and strangely animated all at once. The gritty and witty texture of Hong Kong and New York flows as one instantly.

It’s clear to Mabel Cheung that Chinatown is not a romanticized backdrop. She traced it with patience. Actors in the film were real people she met in Chinatown at the time. As she once remarked, gang members played gang members; shop owners played shop owners, and undocumented migrants played undocumented migrants. They were playing themselves. This gives the film’s slightly awkward performances an added layer of sentiment.

Post-colonial writer and poet Édouard Glissant once described diaspora as an uprooting errantry followed by continuous becoming and relational forming. What we see in this film is precisely such a movement, a diasporic terrain, co-generated by people and place, where vitality persists within limitation.

And where there is vitality, there is also death.

Cindy is accidentally killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout. After Cindy dies, the group goes to her grave. When it is over, Chow does not leave. He stands there, unmoving. Yuen suggests he buy an identity from the dead. The camera holds a long shot. The others walk out of frame one by one while Chow stays. Once again, he is suspended, left with an uncertain future.

I kept watching, through the rolling credits, until the screen went dark. All the warmth and vitality that had filled the film withdrew all at once. Forty years later, we are not so different. And like this final image, the idea of America itself may remain cold and perpetually out of reach. Still, life continues. Like Chow, those who ended up here continue, devoting themselves to the long tragicomedy of living.