Glass and neon.

This was the issue that first mapped the overlap between two cities — Hong Kong and Tokyo — not as adjacent geographies but as adjacent obsessions. Lina Pang had been writing about neon, the specifically 1990s neon, for two years before she put it into a formal editorial argument.

The Gibson thread was the surprise. Neuromancer's Chiba City is not really Japan — it is an American novelist's construction of Japan, read back into the place it had imagined. What Hou Hsiao-hsien does in Millennium Mambo, what Wong Kar-wai does everywhere, is give the neon back its actual weight. The glass and neon issue held both registrations at once — the imagined city and the experienced one.