At this moment, it was these Pacific Rim filmmakers from territories in what has sometimes been referred to as Greater China - here, Tsai and Yang's Taiwan and Wong's Hong Kong - who seemed poised most precisely and precariously on the edge of contemporaneity, who seemed best situated to explain where precisely we in the industrialised and post-industrialised world were and were going as we approached the Y2K deadline. As residents of these cosmopolite refugee territories, they were accustomed to the bewilderment of cultural dislocation, the social isolation resultant from the dissolution of traditional community ties, and the transitory nature of life lived in teeming transit lounge cities, subject to constant construction and destruction under the conditions of hypercapitalist overdrive.