Young and Dangerous: Portland Street Blues

Portland Street Blues is a spinoff film from the Young and Dangerous franchise. This entry focuses on the character Sister Thirteen. Having the bisexual, butch Sister Thirteen as protagonist is extremely progressive and ultimately, a big win in the field of representation. But because this film was made in 1998, this representation is not without its problematic aspects.

I haven’t seen the rest of the Young and Dangerous series. The series focuses on criminal gangs/triads in Hong Kong, with a focus on the Hung Hing gang. And there’s a lot of them. Portland Street Blues is Sandra Kwan Yue Ng’s third of seven appearances in the series as Sister Thirteen. But in the others, she’s a supporting character. In Portland Street Blues, she’s the lead. Portland Street Blues follows Sister Thirteen from her teenage years to her adult success as a gang member. As a teen, her father bemoans her not being a boy. Despite this, Thirteen takes a huge interest in the “family business”. In spite of her gender, Thirteen rises through the ranks due largely to her simple passion for the work. Eventually the leader of Portland street, Sister Thirteen still has to deal with extreme sexism on all sides and her messy, bisexual personal life.

Much of Portland Street Blues is extremely standard beats of a crime drama. Watching Portland Street Blues did not inspire me to delve into the rest of the Young and Dangerous series. Because the way this series seems to handle its plot feels like something you can get from any other number of crime franchises. Of course, what sets Portland Street Blues apart is its protagonist. Female protagonists in this genre are rare and one who is queer in regards to both gender and sexuality feels pretty much unheard of.

As unpleasant as it is to watch, the film dealing with Sister Thirteen’s gender and sexuality in her line of work is one of the strongest elements. The gangs in Young and Dangerous traffic women. They’re not exactly feminist allies. So, seeing a woman rise through the ranks ruffles some feathers. And the film does a good way of showing what would likely be the reality of this. Sister Thirteen is constantly assumed to be less than because of her gender. And beyond this, the threat of rape is omnipresent. In one scene, Thirteen is mistaken for a man. The gang leader she’s talking to initially threatens to kill her. When he realizes Thirteen is a woman, the gang leader makes an addition. He’ll rape her and then kill her.

This aspect is just part of the complicated knot that is Sister Thirteen’s gender. Thirteen presents quite masculine. She says out loud that she’s always felt like a man. Of course, growing up in the environment she did probably doesn’t inundate her with strong positive associations towards femininity. Her father openly wishes she were a boy. And the family business is trafficking women. But this all leads back to the same point. Sister Thirteen presents masculine and has no personal positive connection to the feminine. Occam’s razor in this case is that Sister Thirteen is probably trans. But, that’s not the direct text of the film. Sister Thirteen still uses female pronouns. Likely because of the time in which the film was made, these aspects never solidify into a distinct transmasc character. But based on the evidence in the movie, there’s little to suggest Sister Thirteen is fully cis.

Sadly, this gender nonconforming character gets caught up pretty hard in the film’s overall depiction of gender. Instead of Sister Thirteen destabilizing gender, she just reaffirms why masculinity is good. Sister Thirteen is allowed a spot of power and to be a character with agency because she shuns what makes her feminine. She can be “one of the guys” only if she looks and acts like them. And this includes the degradation of other women. Thirteen also traffics women and thinks poorly of sex workers. The other female characters in Portland Street Blues are uniformly feminine and highly sexualized. They have little agency in the story and are happy to objectify themselves. Disappointingly, Sister Thirteen’s presence just reaffirms the gender binary, with a mild addendum. Masculine presenting people get to have agency in the story and exploit women. Feminine presenting women are still objects over subjects and almost exclusively victims.

Portland Street Blues has a really fascinating lead character. Sandra Kwan Yue Ng was out here in the 90’s playing a gender nonconforming queer character in multiple films. She’s an absolute star and this film proves it by letting her be the lead. But beyond Ng’s character and performance, Portland Street Blues is pretty standard. Standard crime drama plots and standard depictions of feminine women without agency. In isolation, Sister Thirteen is an incredibly strong piece of representation. She’s a butch or full-on transmasc lead in a 90’s crime film. She’s even bisexual! But of course, Sister Thirteen doesn’t exist in isolation. And regrettably, the film she inhabits still has some very binary views on gender and outright negative views on femininity.

Overall rating: 5.6/10

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