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BY LIZA BEAR | Wayne Wang has never shied away from the places to which he has emotional ties. In his earliest films, "Chan Is Missing" (1982) and the delectable comedy of manners "Dim Sum" (1989), the Hong Kong-born director took an unflinching look at the cultural dynamics of his adopted home, San Francisco's Chinatown. A versatile and fluent visual stylist, Wang's first big box office draw was the more mainstream "Joy Luck Club" (1993), an adaptation of Amy Tan's novel, followed by the precisely crafted "Smoke" (1995) and "Blue in the Face" (1995), Paul Auster-derived character studies set in Brooklyn and Manhattan neighborhoods. The new "Chinese Box" -- written by Jean-Claude Carriere -- takes the pulse of Wang's former homeland at a historical turning point, the return of the former British colony to mainland China. Set during the six-month period prior to June 30, 1997, Wang's fictional salute to the big changeover evokes the complex, mysterious hybrid of Chinese and British cultures that defines Hong Kong, and reveals his own ambivalence toward it in the process. The film charts the turmoil of three Hong Kong denizens trying to tie up loose ends in an anxious climate. The legendary Gong Li ("Ju Dou," "Raise the Red Lantern," "Temptress Moon") makes her English-language debut as Vivian, a Chinese immigrant nightclub owner and former hostess. (It's also her first role as a modern dame in blue jeans and shades.) Jeremy Irons ("Reversal of Fortune," "M Butterfly") plays John, a dying English journalist with a family back home who makes a last-ditch attempt to declare his passion for Vivian. He's also shooting a Hi-8 documentary of Hong Kong street life during the last months of British rule, in the course of which he meets hustler Jean (Hong Kong's own superstar Maggie Cheung), who has her own troubled story. Ruben Blades plays photojournalist Jim, John's guitar-playing backup man. Wayne Wang recently spoke with Salon about "Chinese Box," dog-eat-dog capitalism and the experience of loving something that you're destined to lose. Tell me why you made "Chinese Box." Well, I was born and raised in Hong Kong until I was 18, and even after I emigrated to go to school in the U.S., I kept going back there to work. My immediate family stayed until 1984. My wife and her family are from there, too. So Hong Kong was still my home, at least the Hong Kong before the Chinese took over last June. And I had done a little film called "Life Is Cheap But Toilet Paper Is Expensive," a kind of angry, instinctive film about Hong Kong, very small, a gesture. I felt like there was unfinished business there. But I kept running away from doing this film. Instead I tried to do a studio film. Finally by October 1996, I knew that if I didn't do it, I would never do it, and I would hate myself. So I jumped in there, got the financing together, got a script together and just did it. In this film you're registering the passing of an epoch -- Registering the passing of an epoch, and also how four people -- who are somewhat representative of people in Hong Kong, and very different -- the choices they have to make about their lives. That's really what the movie is about. It's very much like a [Milan] Kundera novel. It's about people and their relationships, set against a political backdrop. How close were you to the changeover when you started production? We started writing the script in October. We had something by mid-January, and we just started shooting. So it was very quick. Everything was very rough and a little bit off the cuff. I wanted to have something down [on paper], but also to be free and instinctive with it. We went back during the real changeover and shot for maybe a week to 10 days there. So that's basically the process and why I did this film -- to understand what it means to me to have Hong Kong be handed back to China. I found that the best way to do that was through an English journalist who really knows quite a bit about Hong Kong, and yet is still, in a way, an outsider. How much of the story did you have in broad strokes before you started? Mmmm. Very little. Truthfully, all I knew was that I wanted a man dying during this period. I was very interested in the idea of loss, and dealing with loss, which is my feeling about Hong Kong. And I was interested in death and how somebody would deal with love when he knows he's dying. I've always been fascinated by that. What are some of the things the British did in Hong Kong that you didn't like? Well, first let me say what I liked. If there's anything the English left Hong Kong with, it's this incredible dignity with which they do things. The ritualistic ceremony of retreat was so wonderfully done, it's quite moving. As a child growing up, their ceremonies and rituals were some things that, combined with the Chinese rituals, were very important to me. The other thing that the British provided for Hong Kong was a structure, an organization. They really stopped corruption in Hong Kong. They did a very good job of that. I remember as a child growing up, you had to bribe the postman, 'cause otherwise he wouldn't get your mail right. So that was a 180-degree change because of the British. Then the bad part about the English is they're colonialists and they're really racist. They won't say it out loud, but they're really bad with the Chinese. The court system is a good example. It's old-fashioned, it's all done in English. A Chinese who might be completely innocent but doesn't speak a word of English is assigned an English lawyer and has no idea of what's going on, and they don't care. As a child growing up, there were so many incidents where I felt the British were just treating the Chinese like shit. For me, that's reflected in the film through the Jean character and her traumatic past with the parents of the boyfriend, who basically destroyed their very innocent love for each other. N E X T_P A G E _| Wayne Wang the Brit

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