Days of Being Wild: a Mother Who Would Not Tell, and a Son Who Never Landed

Leslie Cheung's Yuddy asks the same question for over ten years. The whole film is a question nobody will answer.

Hong Kong, 1960. Every so often a young man asks his mother the same question: who is my real mother. Every time, she refuses. The whole of Days of Being Wild turns on that one unanswered question.

What people remember is the minute between Leslie Cheung and Maggie Cheung. We wrote about that in July. This is about the other thread, the one closer to every family: the mother who would not tell.

Two mothers who would not tell

Yuddy's adoptive mother, played by Rebecca Pan, is a former dancer from Shanghai. She took him in, she knows who his birth mother is, and for over a decade she will not say a word. Her reason is simple and very human: if she tells him, he leaves. She keeps a son with a secret.

Eventually she tells him. Yuddy goes to the Philippines and finds the big house. His birth mother sends someone out to say she will not see him.

Two mothers, two silences. One out of fear of losing, one out of shame. The man in between gets neither.

The bird with no legs

Yuddy tells a story most people can recite: a kind of bird with no legs, that flies all its life, sleeps on the wind when it tires, and lands only once, the day it dies.

The audience takes it as a line about a man who will not settle. By the end of the film it means something else: a man who does not know where he came from cannot land. No starting point, nowhere to stop.

Near the end he admits it himself: the bird was dead from the start. It never flew at all.

He will not even let her see his face

His birth mother refuses him. Yuddy turns and walks away from the house, and does not look back. What he tells himself is: if you will not let me see you, I will not let you see me.

It is the hardest scene in the film, not because it is sad but because it is so exact. Two people on either side of a door, one who will not open it, one who will not turn round. She never sees her son's face. He never hears his mother's voice. Both walk away with nothing.

Later he dies on a train. At the moment of his death he knows exactly as much about his mother as he did in the first scene: nothing.

The line we hear in every family

The sentence we hear more than any other doing this work is: "My mother won't talk."

It deserves a careful look. Yuddy's mother would not talk because there was a real secret, real shame, real fear. Most people's mothers have none of that. When they do not talk, it is usually because nobody has asked them a question they could actually answer.

"Tell me about the old days" cannot be answered. "What was the flat you grew up in like?" can. That is the whole difference.

Yuddy's tragedy took two people: one who would not tell, one who would not stay to listen. In most families, only the second half goes wrong.

Leslie Cheung's voice is still here

Leslie Cheung died in 2003. Today you can still sit down and hear him tell the story of the bird in his own voice. That is what a recording is: the person goes, the voice stays, and it is the line he actually said, not someone else's retelling.

Your mother is not Leslie Cheung. No film studio is keeping her voice. If you do not, nobody will.

Ask one question today

Not her life story. One concrete thing: where did you live as a child? Who raised you? What was your first job?

The moment she answers, you already know more than Yuddy ever did. And you have the one thing he never had: her saying it, in her own voice.