‘Your Wife’s a Nigger, Eh?’

Intro to the photo essay ‘Ancient Chinese Secret.’

In Chungking Express (1994), a busty Chinese barkeep in a curve-hugging mini-dress and a strawberry blonde wig clanks a coin into a glittering Wurlitzer jukebox stationed a few feet from the bar.

Moments later, the rock-steady reggae of Dennis Brown’s “Things in Life” begins to churn.

With her right hand gripping the jukebox, the bartender gyrates her hips to the swirling Jamaican rhythm and, with a dainty left hand, raises a slim-necked Corona bottle to her lips.

This mesmerizing scene, one of many in a film packed with visually poetic contradictions, appears near the tail end of one of two interconnected stories in the art-house flick directed by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai.

It’s an art-house flick that, by the way, has virtually nothing at all to do with the subject at the center of the present essay.

Well, other than offering a bit of sexy but still wholly irrelevant imagery to intrigue the reader.

Then again, there is a somewhat legitimate connection.