[ESSAY] “The Moon Still Represents My Heart: Revisiting Tián Mì Mì at Thirty” byBea Phi
Peter Ho-sun Chan (director). Comrades: Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜; Tián Mì Mì), 1996. 118 min.
Perhaps it’s simply an inherent part of what it means to be Asian: to be stuck in one place while longing to be elsewhere.
In 2026, people are often surprised to learn that I regularly listen to, Teresa Teng. She belongs to another generation, they tell me, but I wholeheartedly disagree. The one and only Taiwanese diva, whose catchy, lovestruck hits sold tens of millions of copies throughout the seventies and long after her passing in the nineties, Teng is widely regarded as Asia’s first superstar and is sometimes dubbed the “Eternal Queen of Asian Pop”.
As such, I can’t help but feel that she’ll always be remembered and cherished, and I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. For this year’s Lunar New Year campaign, the luxury fashion house Bottega Veneta commissioned the Chinese director Dorothia Sing Zhang to film a host of Chinese and Taiwanese celebrities singing along to the melody of Teng’s “Tián Mì Mì” (Chinese: 甜蜜蜜; literally “sweet honey”), among them the Olympic swimmer Pan Zhanle and the New Taiwan Cinema director Sylvia Chang. In one particular scene, the Taiwanese actor Yo Yang and the model-entrepreneur Melinda Wang, who are married in real life, cycle along a riverfront as they sing, “Zài nǎlǐ, zài nǎlǐ jiànguò nǐ? Nǐ de xiàoróng zhèyàng shúxī …” (Chinese: “在哪裡，在哪裡見過你？你的笑容這樣熟悉…”; literally “Where, where have I seen you? Your smile is so familiar…”).
❧
Just as “Tián Mì Mì” is one of the most celebrated songs in all of Asia, Zhang’s scene of Yo and Wang on their bicycle in Bottega Veneta’s campaign pays homage to one of the most famous scenes in Hong Kong cinema.
Eighteen minutes into Peter Ho-sun Chan’s 1996 film Tián Mì Mì, which takes its name from Teng’s song but was released in English as Comrades: Almost a Love Story, Li Xiaojun (Leon Lai) cycles through the streets of Hong Kong with Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung) perched behind him.
Zhang’s scene of Yo and Wang on their bicycle pays homage to one of the most famous scenes in Hong Kong cinema. 2026.
A still from Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story
❧
Both Xiaojun and Qiao are mainlanders who have separately come to the city in the eighties in the hope of making a living, but Qiao knows the ins and outs of Hong Kong rather better than Xiaojun does. Born and raised in Guangzhou, she speaks Cantonese, whereas he hails from the north and knows none. Qiao tells Xiaojun that Hong Kongers don’t really offer one another bicycle rides, which leads him to reflect on how different things are in his hometown of Wuxi, in Jiangsu. Suddenly, she hears “Tián Mì Mì” playing, and the two clumsily sing along as they ride. Hypnotised by its rhythm, Qiao kicks her feet in the air, and Xiaojun ever so slightly sways his bicycle from side to side.
Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung) and Li Xiaojun (Leon Lai)
For the most part, the two mainlanders are hopeful about their future in Hong Kong’s golden age. Qiao makes ends meet working at McDonald’s and, together with Xiaojun, takes up a number of odd jobs to save more money: delivering raw chickens, flowers and adult videos by day, and selling Teng’s cassette tapes and vinyl records by night. In his free time, Xiaojun endeavours to learn not only Cantonese but also English, sensing that both languages may serve him well in this city of the future.
Yet even amid Hong Kong’s prosperous eighties, not all is sunshine and rainbows. Qiao sees much of her savings wiped out by the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, while Xiaojun struggles to choose between fidelity to his girlfriend, Fang Xiaoting, back in Wuxi and his newfound feelings for his new “friend” Qiao: a metaphor for the ways in which mainlanders like him are at times torn between the stagnation of their hometowns and the allure of the world beyond.
Things ultimately take a turn for the worse as Qiao and Xiaojun prove unable to reconcile their differing ambitions in Hong Kong, and they drift away from what had been part friendship, part romance. Xiaojun eventually marries Xiaoting and brings her to Hong Kong, while Qiao begins working as a masseuse and becomes romantically involved with one of her clients, a wealthy gangster named Ouyang Pao. In time, even the promise of Hong Kong begins to fail them both. Xiaojun leaves Xiaoting because of his feelings for Qiao and moves to New York City to work in a restaurant, while Qiao abruptly flees there too with Pao after he finds himself in trouble with the law in Hong Kong. Then, during a mugging in Brooklyn, Pao is shot dead, leaving Qiao entirely alone. Much like those of our parents and grandparents, the lives Qiao and Xiaojun lead within the supposed American Dream prove more arduous and lonely than one might hope. Still, there is hope.
❧
Upon its release in 1996, just one year before the Handover, Tián Mì Mì was banned by the Chinese government. The film unsettled the Communists with its exploration of the cultural differences between Hong Kong and the mainland, as well as the evident affection it showed for Teng, who famously supported the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 on top of a long career of activism. She refused ever to perform on the mainland under Communist rule, yet her music flooded its black markets in defiance of a state censorship that decried its bourgeois decadence, and she was ultimately revered by millions across Asia and beyond, regardless of borders and nationality. Even as a Vietnamese American growing up in the twenty-first century, I still heard many of her songs at the house parties and in the ballrooms of Minneapolis, belted out by drunk aunties and uncles who knew not a word of Mandarin yet could sing her songs phonetically and flawlessly at karaoke.
Yet it was only at the start of this year, three decades later, that I finally watched Tián Mì Mì for the first time, at the Metrograph in Lower Manhattan. Even so, it felt like the right moment to see it: that same week, I had met the love of my life, who hails from Jiangxi and who, like Qiao and Xiaojun, came to New York City years ago in the hope of a better future than the mainland could offer. Although we met in America in 2026, we fell in love as though it were still 1996 in Hong Kong. By day, we went on dates in restaurants and along the pavements of the Cantonese enclave of Manhattan’s Chinatown west of the Bowery. By night, we watched the finest of Hong Kong cinema, such as Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) and Aubrey Lam’s Twelve Nights (2000). On our very first date, we went up to Midtown for karaoke and sang “Tián Mì Mì” and other Teng songs, including “Wǒ Zhǐ Zàihū Nǐ” (Chinese: 我只在乎你; literary “I only care about you’) and “Dàn Yuàn Rén Chángjiǔ” (Chinese: 但願人長久; literally “May we live long”), followed by the best of Cantopop from Jacky Cheung, Anita Mui and Faye Wong.
❧
But just as Qiao and Xiaojun discover in both Hong Kong and New York City, our romance was soon imperilled too. With the Trump administration’s mounting restrictions on work visas, my girlfriend was forced to leave the United States and return to China only a few months after we met. She had already spent a year laid off from a job that had once granted her H-1B status, and her time finally ran out in May.
From then on, as we nurtured our love from opposite shores of the Pacific, my girlfriend and I liked to joke that our love story resembled Tián Mì Mì, yet in earnest the film gave us hope that we weren’t alone in our circumstances. Like Qiao and Xiaojun, countless people in our diaspora have been parted in the same way before, and there are Chinese stories thousands of years old that attest to both the tragedy and the persistence of such loves. Perhaps it’s simply an inherent part of what it means to be Asian: to be stuck in one place while longing to be elsewhere, even if it means fostering a love across the ends of the earth.
My own parents, a man who fled the Vietnam War for America and a woman who grew up in its aftermath, likewise fell in love across just as great a distance, exchanging letters until they could at last meet again in Minnesota. Shortly afterwards, they had me. Speaking with them about their love during the summer my girlfriend and I spent apart, I realised that the very fact of my existence meant that our love must be possible.
❧
During our separation, I listened to Teng’s songs more than ever before. Their lyrics lent me much-needed company: in “Tián Mì Mì”, Teng sings of a sweetness in love that she can find only in her dreams, and in “Wǒ Zhǐ Zàihū Nǐ”, a song that often moved her to tears when she performed it live, she at last finds that sweetness in a soulmate whom she begs never, ever to lose.
Dwelling on her words, I find it little wonder that so many Asian directors have used her songs in their films. In Ordinary Heroes (1999), the Hong Kong New Wave auteur Ann Hui uses Teng’s Mandarin ballad “Qiān Yán Wàn Yǔ” (Chinese: 千言萬語; literally “a thousand words and ten thousand languages”) to heighten the grief of activists fighting for democracy in both Hong Kong and China, and at the close of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995), Shirley Kwan’s cover of Teng’s Cantonese hit “Forget Him” offers a consolation of sorts after a hitman (also Lai) and his partner (Michelle Reis) finally part ways. For those of us in Asia and the diaspora beyond, these songs and others serve as shorthand for the emotions our people are so often made to feel before the forces of history, be it love or loss, or both, and they still reach us today, many decades after they were recorded.
❧
Tián Mì Mì, too, makes use of one more Teng song at its conclusion, as word spreads of her death in 1995. She was only forty-two, largely out of the limelight she had enjoyed in the seventies and eighties but undoubtedly an enduring legend throughout the Mandarin-speaking world. It is therefore no surprise that the news stuns Qiao and Xiaojun, as it did millions that day, when they hear it over the radios of Lower Manhattan. By then, the two have been apart for several years, entirely unaware that they are at times only a few blocks from each other in New York City. As the film draws to a close, we hold our breath, wondering whether they will ever see each other again.
While Qiao and Xiaojun wander alone through the very streets my girlfriend and I once walked together, Teng’s most famous song, “The Moon Represents My Heart”, finally plays, its lyrics professing a love that, like the moon in the night sky, refuses ever to waver or change, come what may. Eventually, Qiao is stopped on the pavement by a window display of televisions broadcasting news of Teng’s death. Xiaojun then walks past her, failing to notice the woman he loved in Hong Kong a decade earlier, while she remains transfixed by the images of Teng before her very eyes. After a few seconds, however, he miraculously returns to her side to watch with her, and the televisions suddenly play the melody of the song they once sang in the streets of Hong Kong. At last, they turn and look at one another. They smile.
Thirty years have passed since Peter Ho-sun Chan released Tián Mì Mì, and only ten since the Chinese government finally lifted its ban on the film. Much has changed since then, in both Hong Kong and New York City, yet much has remained the same. After Qiao learns of Teng’s death, she walks past the legendary Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown, which still stands on Doyers Street today. Many idols in the Mandarin-speaking world still sing Teng’s songs even now, whether it be Lu Han re-recording “Tián Mì Mì” for the film’s long-overdue mainland debut in 2015 or aespa’s Ningning performing it on the South Korean programme Good Day last year. Still, the moon that hangs in every night sky is the same one Teng sang of in 1977, the same one our parents and grandparents gazed up at as they listened to her music over the past half century, and the same one my girlfriend and I greeted on the many nights we spent counting the days until we could be together again. Just like Qiao and Xiaojun, she and I have now at last been reunited in New York City, and of course, “Tián Mì Mì” still sounds as sweet as it did thirty years ago.
How to cite: Phi, Bea. “The Moon Still Represents My Heart: Revisiting Tián Mì Mì at Thirty.“ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 1 Nov. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/11/01/yuanfen.
Bea Phi is a Vietnamese-American editor and film critic based in Brooklyn.