There are many reasons Wong Kar-Wai is a genius, but perhaps the zenith of his powers is how accurately he brought the spirit of Faye Wong to the screen in Chungking Express. Faye’s performance as, well, Faye, wasn’t simply a fortuitous intersection of perfect casting and well-written script. It was something else, entirely. At least from a fan’s perspective, it was as if Kar-Wai had taken an x-ray of his actress and discovered the spot where the soul lives. No, that black mass forming on the lungs is not cancer—that’s you. This is Faye Wong.

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            There’s always something strange about hearing music from other countries. I’m not talking about world music or traditional music or anything like that. I’m talking about rock ‘n’ roll and pop and the kind of music that has a distinctly western origin. Usually, when you hear a band from a non-English speaking country, it sounds a bit…well, off. And not just because you can’t understand the lyrics.

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            All my music journalism tricks fail me when it comes to Faye Wong.

            I can’t rely on a clever dissection of lyrics, I can’t dig into her songs the way I would a tossed-off pop single or stretch for a comparison to Morrissey or some other hero of my youth. It’s just not the same thing.

            Faye Wong is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. She has an enormous following in China, and the Japanese love her. So much so, in fact, that she recently signed a lucrative deal with Sony in Asia, with their eyes on capitalizing on this Hong Kong beauty’s newfound popularity in land of the rising sun. (Her first album on the label, To Love, was released in November.) Attempts to contact her, to go through the label in order to write about her, are met with requests about photo use and article length, and will Faye appear on the cover? All so I can produce a piece on her in a country where most people haven’t heard of her.

            And those who have heard of her may not even know it. Have you seen Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express? Remember the character of the girl who used to sneak into the cop’s apartment and clean it, flying a toy airplane around his living room while he was out keeping the street safe from riff-raff? That character wasn’t just named Faye, she was Faye. That Cantonese cover of the Cranberries wasn’t just some randomly picked singer, either—that was Faye Wong. She played the part, she leant her pipes to the soundtrack.

            So, like I said, you know her, but you didn’t know you knew her.

            My love affair with Faye Wong began in much the same way. Having become obsessed with Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 film, In The Mood For Love, after acquiring it on DVD, a friend of mine told me I had to see Chungking Express and promptly had it shipped to me. I was mesmerized by the presence of this young woman on my TV screen. Clearly, as a viewer, I had found myself at that amazing intersection where casting and script collide head-on at the perfect moment. Kar-Wai knew what he was doing. What he captured on film was like an X-ray capturing the soul of the actress. Like Billy Wilder capturing Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, or Kate Hudson embodying Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. We had gone beyond what could be written and photographed, into things that can’t conventionally be expressed.

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            As luck would have it, not long after seeing Chungking Express for the first time, I had the opportunity to visit a friend studying in Beijing. It was a whirlwind trip into the most overwhelming, dazzling city I have ever set foot in. Much of it was spent looking at the endless shelves of bootleg DVDs and CDs. When I was done marveling at the speed with which the Chinese black market distributed new American product (“But Gangs of New York only came out in the theatres two days ago! How is it that every shop has a copy?”), I had a mission. I wanted to buy some Wong Fei.

            My mission proved to be much more difficult than I had anticipated.

            You see, there aren’t a lot of “official” releases on the streets of Beijing. Most of the CDs you find in the shops have been cobbled together somewhere by a small company—or maybe even just a guy in his apartment or the backroom of the store—looking to make a buck. From what I could tell, the competition extends to what you put on your package. Just a regular old album won’t do. Anyone can release the latest Robbie Williams disc, so the crafty bootlegger is going to throw on a heap of extra tracks, and if he’s feeling particularly industrious, a whole second disc. It wasn’t uncommon to find an artist’s most recent album coupled with his last album as an added bonus.

            So I was faced with a wall of Faye Wong, and no idea how to discern any one disc from another. Josh’s Fayevourite Faye Wong, the best fan site on the net for Faye’s music, shows 46 official releases, including compilations. None of the two albums I picked are listed there.