(Photo provided to China Daily)
"Now, after watching them repeatedly online, I can recite many parts of the dialogues."
Despite the films' box-office failures in the mainland all those years ago, it was not the end of the saga.
The fate of the films in the mainland was seen to have many hidden meanings and even triggered philosophical analyses following an article on a Tsinghua University forum in 1997.
This led to the films becoming popular among college students, and the popularity peaked around 2000.
Then, the films' dialogues became popular on the internet and they are still often quoted by people today in their daily conversations.
In 2014, the films were re-released in the mainland.
"I found them to be a lecture on love," says Xiao.
Explaining why the films became popular in the mainland years after it first found fame in Hong Kong, she says: "The emotional confusion caused by urbanization in the mainland came many years later than Hong Kong due to the different pace of development in both societies.
