Kartika_Issue15

HEARTBREAK
Wah-Ming Chang
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
The year 2008 was the fifth anniversary of the death of Leslie Cheung. He
died jumping out a window. All but one of his obituaries attributed cause of
death to suicide. The exception had been written by me: I had used the word
“heartbreak” instead of “suicide.” Today I recognize the sentimentality of
this claim. Cheung had killed himself. What had caused his death was
gravity. I imagine the act of defenestration to involve a mixture of elation
and terror, with neither, in each its totality, unrelated to the other. The arms
cannot help but strike out for balance, the legs tensed for the landing, the
head bent forward perhaps to cushion itself—a measurement, in a way, of
life meeting death.
I have several photographs of him from the winter of 2002, and in the
majority of them he has a sword in his hand. This hand with the sword never
wavers, acting as a weight while the rest of his body is always a slender blur,
as though motion were relegated only to flesh and not to metal. The portraits
had been taken over the span of a weekend that winter, in preparation for a
lengthy profile about the tenth anniversary of his film Farewell, My
Concubine. The following spring, he jumped from the twenty-fourth floor of
the Mandarin Orange Hotel.
In 2008 a film festival was held in his honor in Vancouver, and I went. At
the last minute I packed the photographs.
It was only in Vancouver, where he’d retired from his singing career, from
1990 to 1995, that Cheung had enjoyed any peace. Some believed he’d
chosen Canada to treat his depression. Clinical depression, in addition to an
impossible relationship with fame as a pop singer and a film star, had undone
him. After his death, speculation about the depression varied widely, the
most popular touching on his sexuality. Though he had openly discussed his
partner in interviews, many of his fans had believed him to be heterosexual,
or, at the very least, a moody eccentric.
Later, his partner revealed that Cheung had tried to commit suicide once
before, in 2002.
On my first night in Vancouver, in a Chinese restaurant down the street from
my hotel, my waiter studied the photographs, which I’d spread out on my
little corner of the table. The sword in Cheung’s hand especially arrested him.
He asked, “Were all these taken by you?”
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