Trespassing the Sinophone Border: On Fruit Chan's Prostitute Trilogy Available to Purchase

This chapter examines Fruit Chan’s three films on sex work, namely Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), and Three Husbands (2018). In Durian Durian, the friendship between a sex worker named Yan and an illegal immigrant girl named Fan in Hong Kong maps a minor transnational feminism across mainland China and Hong Kong. Hollywood Hong Kong further queers the geopolitical border through the transpacific travels of Hung Hung, a sex worker. Finally, Three Husbands daringly symbolizes the geopolitical tension within Hong Kong by showing how the female protagonist, Ah Mui, and her erotic attachments to her three husbands conjure the symbolism of Hong Kong mediated by the forces of British colonialism, Chinese nationalism, and global capitalism. The film ultimately undoes this masculine narrative by emphasizing Ah Mui’s constant mobility across the human and nonhuman divide. Overall, Chan’s cinematic aesthetic trespasses multiple Sinophone borders.