If a thing is how you fantasize it, then listen up: Chungking Mansions wants you to fantasize about a speciality of mass culture: faux naturalisms. AKA any kind of space-time delivered with a built-in strategy of persuasion — a realism realistically unreal, a landscape that you can basically make up.

For example: you are in the Jeep entering the forest. Or, you are in your submarine, descending into the ocean. Or it’s not the ocean, but a mountaintop; or it’s not the mountaintop, but the crags; or it’s not the crags, but the mouth of a blue whale, swallowing you whole.

You know the narrative. You’ve been there before. In front of your TV screen, at the museum, on the airplane w/ your laptop.

So then. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about the journey you want to take.

OK then.
Out there, the air is moist. I can tell walking through it.
Thank you so much for bringing your own Klean Kanteen.
My crew will be right here with you.
And remember some things:

Bears are of a windy nature and are full of the death-drive, & sometimes they resemble the gates of Hell, contain the souls of the dead, and have hollow bones through which the souls of the dead rise from under the earth, taking on the form of a human or a plant that looks like female genitals. & sometimes they smell like semen.

Wild Guide to Anywhere by Chungking Mansions

In parts of India, it is believed that man-eating tigers are not tigers at all, but men who have transformed themselves into tigers to commit, for their own pleasure, masked acts of murder. These counterfeit tigers are recognizable, because they have no tails.

A monitor lizard can smell a dead carcass several miles away. A female lays her eggs in a termite nest and then returns to the exact spot exactly nine months later to break open the nest to let the hatchlings go free. A monitor lizard can count to six.

And the stars, what are they, when you look up to them:

Oh, they are little chairs; they are little thrones; they are nails nailed to the sky; they are half crocodile, half hummingbird; they are orbs of goodness; they are pound-cakes in the celestial oven; they are not erratic or pointless but important; they are in the Palace of the Cantaloupe; they are in the Gate of the Watermelon; they dwell in the House of the 3 Divine Clouds; they are stupid; they are liquid mansions; they are coke machines; they are shredding machines; they are a cellphone in the midst of texting; they are a tongue licking another tongue; they are erotic; they are beehives; they are divine glaciers; they are up there, yes, the stars, a wild guide to anywhere.