‘Cyclone’: A Nuanced But Accessible Exploration of Trans Experience

In the opening frames of Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s Cyclone (超風), trans sex worker Ye Chiu-feng, or Cyclone (Liu Yuqiao), wrestles with a john on a dark street, guzzling water and trying her best to fulfil her client’s kinky request. Like so many films about troubled sex workers, the job goes poorly and the john refuses to pay. But unlike so many films about troubled sex workers, Cyclone fights back, refuses to let him take advantage of her, gets into a physical altercation with him and takes the cash she’s owed from his wallet. The scene sets the tone for Cyclone and its nuanced exploration of identity, as we witness Cyclone’s evolution into someone who finally settles into her own skin.

For many, that opening sequence may play simply as the kind of rote “streetwalker and trick” skirmish portrayed in countless crime dramas since the dawn of cinema. What distinguishes it in Cyclone is that the trans woman is given the agency to defend herself successfully, and the audience is presented with Cyclone not as a victim but as someone providing a service and pushing back against exploitation. LGBTQ+ characters, particularly trans characters, have only recently been allowed happy or complex endings in cinema, and the dignity of being motivated in the same ways as everyone else.

Cyclone was co-written by Yung and a young crew of emerging filmmakers and screenwriters — Thomas Leung Wing-ho, Carmen Hau Kai-men, Chan Wai-ki and Lo Lok-yung — along with trans writer, community advocate, researcher and soon-to-be counsellor Annabelle Li Kayee. Li’s input goes a long way to explaining Cyclone’s honesty, complexity, refusal to sanitise the reality of a migrant sex worker and the hand-wringing that goes into gender-affirming surgery.

“I do not want transgender life to be reduced to suffering, but my own life has been shaped by trauma,” wrote Li on her website after the film’s premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in February. “I do not want trans women to be filmed as spectacle, but I also refuse to hide the body, sex, desire, shame, humour, danger and hunger that can be part of transgender life. I am interested in dignity, not respectability: dignity as an inward form of self-recognition; respectability as an outward demand to become legible, acceptable and safe for others to consume.”

Made in collaboration

For Yung, it was crucial to have an authentic collaborator for the script process as well as on set, where Li also served as intimacy coordinator, particularly as star Liu is not trans. “[Li] had a strong understanding of the script’s portrayal of [Cyclone’s] awareness of her own body in each sex scene,” says Yung. “As our primary guide, she explained the character’s psychological and physiological states very clearly, which resulted in many subtle and multi-layered aspects to her we [wouldn’t] have been aware of, and she helped us through a BDSM scene.” 

Yung incorporated Li’s own romantic experiences into the story, particularly when Cyclone gets together with friends, and included a line of dialogue Li came up with on set that encapsulates some of the film’s themes: “Imagination can make us freer.” Li cameos as one of Cyclone’s doctors.

Star Liu was Yung’s second most critical collaborator. When he first floated the project to Liu, he recommended she watch the 2019 documentary The Two Lives of Li Ermao, which played a role in creating the Cyclone character. Yung recalls hearing Liu’s voice in a crowd one day and finding it “androgynous, indistinguishable from a male voice.” Combined with some of her early-period television roles, in which her characters were often gender-swapped, and her childhood martial arts practice, that made Liu an ideal fit. “She was actually a big part of creating this character.”

Following her confrontation with the john, Cyclone goes back to her low-paying cha chaan teng job, where she meets Bian (theatre actor Edwynn Li Yu-hin, who had a small part in Love Lies), a delivery driver with gambling and drug problems. Despite this, Bian is a sensitive guy who is attracted to Cyclone and unbothered that she’s trans — and that she’s still saving money for gender-affirming surgery, the reason she relocated to Hong Kong from mainland China. Bian introduces Cyclone to a brothel owner, Jinxing (Leung Kwan-leun), who makes her his star attraction. 

It’s not long before Cyclone becomes part of the makeshift family that includes newcomer Xiaomei (Jenny Suen Wo-yi), also from mainland China, den mother Fong (Sun Lai-ping) and married couple Gaga and photographer Castle (Kiri Zhou Lyu and Castle King-Kin Ip), who have a son everyone dotes on, Tommy (Marek Li Hoi-lam). Dual cinematographers Tong Woon-lam and Leung Yau-cheong alternate between lush, natural images for Cyclone and Bian’s first moments of intimacy, saturated and garish images when Cyclone feels boxed in by work or intolerance, and soft, warm images during moments of joy.

Found family

It’s within the framework of found-family melodrama that Yung and Li give Cyclone room to breathe and grow as a complete character. (Cyclone named herself after Mei Chaofeng — known as Cyclone Mei in translation — a tragic figure from Louis Cha Leung-yung’s classic martial arts novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes.) As much as Cyclone is accessible thanks to its relatively traditional narrative structure, Yung and Li maintain a rare focus on Cyclone as someone forced to reckon with identity — as well as on those in the broader community responsible for that. The film is unafraid to argue that straight men who seek out Cyclone’s services and fetishise her are complicit in how we collectively position trans women and force them to constantly evaluate themselves. 

While conducting research for the film, Yung says the crew encountered a common sentiment: “Our own imagination of our bodies is more important and meaningful than others’ preconceived notions and what they might derive from them.” Cyclone still has a penis and is therefore an invaluable asset to the brothel, but leaning into that clashes with her own sense of self. It’s a massive leap in storytelling.

While trans characters have made headway in Asian cinema in recent years, most still fall back on surgery as the brass ring — the step that will make characters so-called “real” women: Jun Li’s Tracey, Zhang Wei’s The Rib (both 2018) and Eiji Uchida’s Midnight Swan (2020) all rest on surgery as the last stop on a long journey. Cyclone makes no judgement on the decision to undergo surgery or not, but it departs from that pattern in how it concludes Cyclone’s story. At times the film takes the conventional route to the ending, dropping in flashbacks to Cyclone’s life in her small Chinese hometown and to the betrayals by friends and family that set her on the path to Hong Kong. But the closing frames are only mildly ambiguous and suggest that, at least in the moment, Cyclone has cemented her identity despite bypassing gender-affirming surgery. She gets a happy ending.

“I think the reason she finds happiness is because she understands the meaning of freedom,” Yung finishes, adding that Mei Chaofeng’s story in the wuxia novel is tragic. “However, she stays true to herself. I think Mei Chaofeng is very representative of queer culture. During my fieldwork, I discovered that whether or not to undergo gender affirmation surgery is a major life event, and we tried to explore the anxiety of it through Cyclone.”

 In one of the film’s most affecting moments, Cyclone strips off her make-up and binds her chest in anticipation of returning to China to visit her family. Liu keeps her frustration, rage and sorrow wound tightly as she packs until it finally boils over, and we bear witness to the cost and pain of Cyclone being compelled to revert to her inauthentic self. It’s a short, quiet segment that distills the film to its essence.

Cyclone opens in Hong Kong cinemas on 2 October.