Hugo Kenzo | 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019

finding his way through the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Kenzo (screenwriter and director) 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019 [15 minutes]

For reasons a bit inexplicable, the young Hong Kong delivery by ChunHo (Cheuk Piu Champi Lo) has fallen almost desperately in love with one of his customers, an expat lawyer living in Hong Kong, Eric (Phillip Smith) who several days a week orders up the dumplings from the stand for which he works.

    He literally dances down the street in delight in imagining a relationship with his heartthrob.

    As ChunHo makes clear to his friend Jasper (Thisby Cheng), he is determined the next time he meets up with Eric to begin a conversation, but each time he knocks, the lawyer is on the phone in exasperated conversation with his major client, presumably George (Mike Leeder), a crude CEO who has no patience for any human niceties and demands every document immediately, even when it’s been sent.

    Jasper warns him that it’s always dangerous to cross cultural lines in Hong Kong, to even imagine that the white elite will take the Chinese citizens of the city seriously.

     Finally, ChunHo, through the accident of witnessing Eric’s bag of fruit break open and helping him to retrieve the bag’s several lemons, wheedles his way into his customer’s apartment, expressing his sympathy for Eric’s frustration over his employment, and in a kind of wild presumption, telling him that he too hates his job, suggesting, somewhat facetiously, that they both quit and start up a band.

     When Eric—a bit startled by the delivery boy, engaging him in this imaginative conversation, but enjoying the boy’s logic nonetheless—suggests that it might be a disco group, Eric drops the needle on a record already on his player, a 70s disco song. The next step is to find a name for their nonexistent group, and Eric finally makes a dinner appointment with the young delivery boy to discuss the matter.

       Once more, Jasper, fearful that his dear friend will have his heart broken, warns him against the meetup, but now the Asian boy is convinced that he has his love’s attention, even though he is still not sure that he is even gay.

        When ChunHo arrives at the apartment, however, he finds a sign on the door announcing to arrivals to follow the music to the rooftop, where, as the boy soon discovers, Eric is throwing a well-heeled party. Obviously Eric has forgotten about their date, and is rather startled at the boy’s

appearance. His client George suddenly appears beside him demanding to know who the young kid is, Eric reporting that he is his delivery boy, George immediately holding forth that he should create a service to deliver booze, it would make fortune, he insists.

       So does ChunHo get permission to remain, but obviously, knowing no one of this almost totally white community, feels more than a little uncomfortable.

       When he finally follows Eric and others back downstairs, he finds George and Eric arguing about the fact that they’ve run out of vodka. George, seeing ChunHo on the staircase, immediately demands that Eric send him on a run for Vodka and other bottles of liquor. Not quite knowing how he should respond, Eric capitulates to the bully, handing ChunHo a large bill and sending him, as if he were his own personal delivery boy, on a run.

      Angrily and emotionally crushed, ChunHo takes the subway back home, crying his eyes out before his friend Jasper.

      A few days later, while at work, ChunHo again gets a dumpling order he is to deliver to Eric. He refuses and convinces Jasper to go in his stead. When Jasper arrives at the door, he hands over the dumplings telling Eric off for his dreadful behavior, Eric begging him to tell him how to reach ChunHo, insisting that he has been trying to contact him for days and is sorry for what happened.

But Jasper can only respond with his hate for having so hurt his friend.

    Finally, Eric tracks ChunHo down, trying to explain that he has been working with such inhuman people such as George for so long, he has forgotten how wonderful and good-looking the actual people who make-up the heart of this city are. He begs the boy to hear him out, insisting he must join him for dinner since they haven’t found a name for their band.

   ChunHo eventually forgives him, but insists that he has promised this evening to Jasper with who he is planning to attend dinner with the money he’s been given for the vodka. But he will be available later in the week. For the first time Eric actually gives him his private phone number, writing it on his hand. And they kiss. It looks like the start of a true relationship, one of the first times possibly that a young man has been able to cross over the cultural and social lines of Hong Kong.

     Most of the amateur commentators on this film, we’re buying it however, one Letterboxd commentator, with the moniker CutUncut2021, noting:

 

“Short and sweet, this simple tale could easily be developed into something longer, giving more rein to young Cheuk Piu Champi Lo and his sprightly cohort Cheng, but maybe without the creepy Phillip Smith, whose charmless performance marred the entire tale.”

 

     Frankly, I’d like to see Eric and his new friend really develop a relationship and break with the class and social codes that hold back most of the relationships between the colonizers and the city’s actual citizens. If Eric was just a little less uptight and gifted, I might even imagine them really starting up a band that drifts away from disco into an eclectic mix of musical styles Western and Asian. But, like Jasper, I can’t see that really happening; the lines are too difficult to cross. But at least Hugo Kenzo’s short rom-com tried.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).