(or, A Dragon Crawls Across the Moon: A Movie in Two Acts)

1.

My cousin invites me over for dinner the evening before my flight. While he and his wife set the table, their daughter lifts a lizard out of its vivarium, cradles it in her small hands, places the creature gently upon my outstretched arm. Claws dig soft craters into the inked planets beneath my skin as the chameleon climbs up to my shoulder and drapes its tail around my neck, swivels its beady eyes towards me.

Tonight’s meal: Swiss-sauce chicken and rice. Winter melon soup with lean pork and dried scallops. Mango sago from the dessert place around the corner—a shop which used to be the Adventureland arcade grandfather took us to back in primary school. (The last time I saw my cousin we were both draped in funerary whites, folding golden paper bars to be burnt for the myth of a man.)

I spit the bones out; we make plans. Camping trip, ice-skating, or how about we brave the trail to Bride’s Pool the next time you’re back to visit? She’ll be old enough to take along for a hike then. (Yeah, sure. Next time I’m back home to visit.) When is that? (What time is it now? It’s getting late.)

Soup’s gone cold. I didn’t mean to forget.

Beneath the window, the unpeopled street is a hollowed-out thing, broad strokes of smudged paint clinging to the walls and the shutters like swirls of coalescent spirits.

It’s Ghost Festival tonight and I am still hungry.

2.

Back on the moon looking down. All flowers are artifice here, all forests memory.
Everything obsolete pressed into reels and reels of flammable nitrate.
Ann Hui once said: Films are about redemption.
Tarkovsky: I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.
Somewhere in Argentina, Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing are starting over.

In a time we no longer speak of, scrawled on a billboard: 你的生命變革是怎樣的一段故事?
It looks like this—
Planet around the sun.
Clock’s-needle, pistol-chamber, a zoetrope, pirouette. They’re all the same, really.
A city used to be a revolution. Now it is a decadence.

Or no. How about this?
A city is a decaying world is silica set to the furnace, fever-bright and amorphous, a forever breaking down and building up. Shaped by air, by heat, by the stories we tell about it.
Remember: This city is not the monster but the cage that holds it.

Or else, this:
The city is the cinema and my jagged silhouette dances against the projection, a flickering scar-crossed boy who can never grow up. Flimsy little green paper thing held together with bamboo twigs, coasting through turbulence and reeled in by a spool of powdered-glass line. Grasp the memory in a hand and it will cut your palm, translucent string now stained with the childlike promise of blood-brotherhood. (Here is a razor and here is the tether. You know what to do to set yourself free.)

Keep the credits rolling.

© 2025 Ewen Ma