I will only see when I am in dreams.
– Han Kang, Greek Lessons
Kiss of the Rabbit God (2019) is a stylized short film about the sexual awakening of a Chinese American restaurant worker who is visited by the Chinese deity of gay love –– Tu’er Shen 兔兒神 (the “Rabbit God”) –– in his dreams.
Set in Los Angeles, the film follows Matt (played by Teddy Lee), who works for a family-run Chinese restaurant called Lucky Dragon. The Rabbit God (played by Jeff Chan) arrives when Matt is trying to lift some heavy boxes in a hot and chaotic kitchen. The restaurant’s doors fling open revealing a stylish stranger with brightly dyed-red hair. Matt seems immediately attracted to the mysterious guest, who encourages him to embrace the intricacies and intimacies of queer love.
Teddy Lee and Jeff Chan in Kiss of the Rabbit God (Andrew Thomas Haung (2019)
The mysterious guest is the director Andrew Thomas Huang’s imagination of Tu’er Shen, a deity from Chinese mythology who is said to rule the affairs of men who love men.
In Chinese mythology, the Rabbit God first appears in the 18th century in a collection of folktales compiled by the Qing dynasty scholar Yuan Mei. The story is about Hu Tianbo, a young soldier from the Fujian province who fell in love with the governor and confessed his affection to him. The governor was furious about Hu’s confession and had him beaten to death. A month later, Hu shows up in a villager’s dream saying that he has won the respect of the gods of the afterlife because his love towards the Governor was genuine and moving:
Today the lord of the underworld appointed me as Rabbit God, specifically responsible for men who love men in the world of the living. People can now build temples for me, and I can attract incense (worship).
In the dream, Hu tells the villager to build a temple in his name so that people can burn incense to ask for his help and blessing. The Rabbit God has since become the symbol and guardian of gay love across the Chinese-speaking communities.
Still from Kiss of the Rabbit God (Andrew Thomas Haung (2019)
Like myths, dreams tend towards elusive and allegorical meanings. They are subject to narrative embellishments as they move through different times. Yet they also have the capacity to give us a glimpse of some of our deepest desires, hopes, and aspirations. In this sense, dreams are a site of transformation, opening up possibilities for new meanings and horizons, and a space for new narratives of belonging.
By reimagining queer desire using an ancient context, Kiss of the Rabbit God evokes the potentiality of dreaming as a form of worldmaking. The film is a lyrical exploration of the inner world of a queer Chinese immigrant living in America, an attempt to recreate the memories and sensations that the Chinese diaspora experiences and embodies. It is also a means to visualize and vocalize instances of queerness from Chinese mythology.
Known for his music video collaborations with artists like Bjork, Thom Yorke, and FKA Twigs, Andrew Thomas Huang often creates hybrid mixed media works that range from live action to motion capture, puppetry, and simulation-driven animation. Folklore and fantasy are recurring motifs. As a self-described queer POC artist and filmmaker, Huang is interested in combining Chinese mythology with futurism and queer storytelling to engender new ways of making images and creating worlds that viewers have not seen before.
Andrew Thomas Huang. Photographed by Ryan Kevin
As Huang has noted in interviews, this drive to create new worlds is connected to his experience growing up as a queer Chinese American in a predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles: “It’s like having a phantom limb, reaching back to some sort of origin that doesn’t really exist, yet you feel compelled to reach it anyway. It’s something felt rather than seen.”
The director has specifically named Kiss of the Rabbit God as the work he is most proud of: “I don’t speak my parents’ language [Cantonese]— my parents didn’t want me to. It’s a shame and it’s a total loss. I think that is probably the single most disappointing thing that I’ve lost from my culture. The only thing I have is my flesh and blood. And here’s a character [Matt] who is claiming just that.” The film is less of realist immigrant-coming-of-age story than an exploration of how the transgression of one’s own racial and sexual identities can be made possible through reclaiming one’s body and flesh.
Kiss of the Rabbit God can be understood, in this respect, as a means for Huang to both reclaim his heritage and reconcile with the pain of his language loss. Dreams become Huang’s return passage to his Chineseness. Through the protagonist’s oneiric encounter with the Rabbit God, the film enables him to retain that part of his identity and reclaim his heritage. And indeed, in the climactic dream sequence, flesh and blood become the material that binds the characters’ shared existence as Chinese gay men. Pain and pleasure turn Matt’s dream into an embodied moment of connection.
Using images and sound to ask important questions like what it means to be Chinese and queer, Huang creates a liminal realm where the conscious mind and the mystic collide. In so doing, the director invites viewers to take part in an oneiric encounter where a new queer mythology can be invented.
I still remember the first time I saw Kiss of the Rabbit God. It was in the depths of winter. Just another cold night in Ottawa. I was searching for films that portray intimate bonds between queer kinship and diasporic belonging. I found Andrew Thomas Huang’s website and saw a list of his photographic and video works. I went through each title and Kiss of the Rabbit God caught my eye.
The film was exhilarating. It was as if I was transported to a dreaming state, participating in Matt’s journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery. The most striking scene comes near the end. In the beginning of this dream sequence, a panting, a half-naked Matt starts carving his chest with a small knife. The camera shifts to Matt’s hand and offers a close-up of his shaking fingers holding the knife. Viewers can hear Chinese classical music and a voiceover narrates the story of Hu Tianbo.
A stream of blood slowly appears.
The Rabbit God holds Matt hand with their fingers interlaced.
The camera gently follows the blood as it streams down Matt’s chest onto a symbol for double happiness that is crafted on a jade pendent that Matt wears. Here, for a moment, I feel placed within Matt’s dreamy encounter with the Rabbit God. I am in Matt’s dream.
For a moment, it was real. It was real because I feel like I am inside Matt’s body. I am inside the sensation. I become the sensation.
I can feel Matt’s agony as the camera moves.
I feel like my chest is being carved too.
Huang uses different forms of cinematic language and the enmeshment of time, space and dreams to make palpable the disorienting experience of embodying queerness: he does not simply depict Chinese queer desire but uses visual language and narrative form to fabricate it, to embody it.
This dream space of queer Chinese desire is an affective one. It becomes a site for imagining another possible future and engendering a vision of alternative worlds that I long for. The film creates a space that helps me to rethink what queerness and Chineseness mean to me –– to make me realize how visualizing the Chinese mythology and literati traditions, even if only in an elusive dream space, enables us to live through the trauma of the past and the austerity of the present.
Many queer Chinese people living in the diaspora see identities and belongingness as a multiplicity of intersections. Feelings become a threshold that we must embody to create a diverse world within the reality. What do we feel? How do we feel? What exactly is the 情感 (emotions) that we feel when we are trying to negotiate with the tension between our new and old homeland? Especially when verbal language fails us when we try to talk about our feelings towards migration, racialization, and sexuality.
We need a language that can speak the unspeakable and visualize the invisible. I see dreams as an evocative and poetic language that utters the past, present, and future of the Queer Asian diaspora. Dreams offer us a range of affective vocabularies to vocalize the voices, stories, and textures of queer Asian diasporic communities so that we can form new relations and make new kin.
Kinship can be perceived as a felt phenomenon through our dreams and sensations. These feelings come from interactions between bodies, dwelling spaces and oneiric encounters. In this sense, dreams elicit different forms of queer diasporic kinship and unleash the utopian potentialities of becoming and imagining better forms of living. In Kiss of the Rabbit God, Huang memorialises queer love, fostering solidarity, kinship, and a sense of queer futurity that we need and yearn for.
Sometimes in the edge of sleep, our desires are projected against the wall of memory.
How we choose to live is the ways in which we dream about the present.
Huang’s film helps me make sense of my Chineseness and encourages me to embrace my own queer desire. I try to reach for a deeper dream space: an imagined reality where I feel I truly belong.
Pain, displacement, memories, and imagination merge. I close my eyes, wandering along the shore of dreams.
My own iteration of Matt’s dream.
Gigi (Wai-Chi) Wong is a researcher and writer from Hong Kong. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Studies at Western University in Canada. Her research interests include moving-image arts, new media studies, gender and sexuality, affect theory, and diaspora and transnational studies. Her PhD research focuses on the articulation and circulation of queer Asian diasporic affect in digital and immersive media by considering gestures and bodily movements as a form of affective residue in reimagining queer belongings and better forms of citizenship.