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  The Mistress |
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INTRODUCTION
Chinese Women’s Issues Under the Polar Aesthetics
of Female Suffering and Mulan-ism
Since the 1919 May Fourth New Culture movement, the idea of a Chinese feminism has been inextricably caught between a struggle for Chinese national identity and the imperialist legacy of imported Western ideas. While there were indigenous attempts at non-Western feminism before May Fourth, such as the gender egalitarianism espoused by the proto-communist Taiping Rebellion, or the female sisterhoods of the Pearl River Delta, the modernity adopted after China’s 1911 Republican revolution quickly established the Western prejudices adopted by Chinese intellectuals. Mainland feminist scholar Wang Zheng (1999, 17-18) has characterized the modern feminism that followed May Fourth as a battle between two kinds of liberal humanism. The first was a socially progressive philosophy positing women as human beings separate from but equal to men1, and the second a masculinist philosophy in which the "human" in "humanism" was automatically thought of as the educated, modern, First World male that Chinese revolutionaries should emulate. The woman who follows the male slant of this second type of humanism should — in order to achieve equal rights — impersonate and effectively become a neutered man, something like the butch, cross-dressing Republican revolutionary played by Lin Ching-hsia in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986).
Wang calls this masculinized scenario the "Mulan subject position," after the traditional story of legendary heroine Hua Mulan, who dutifully impersonates a male soldier when her ailing father is unable to fight. It is ironic, though, that the Mulan legend should have become a revolutionary role model for Chinese women, considering the tale actually regurgitates filial piety and other outmoded Confucianisms, and that Mulan must forever alternate between masculine power and female (hetero-)sexuality without being able to synthesize the two.2 But the Mulan subject position was only the tip of the iceberg, for revolutionary women’s political problems were in fact argued by male revolutionaries, who saw in the liberation of women a universal, humanist allegory for their own liberation from Confucianism, dynasticism, and other remnants of the ancien regime. Analogously, in the climate of today’s transnational cinema, few female-directed Mainland Chinese films are imported to the West3, and the cinematic window through which we view Chinese "women’s issues" has been forever fogged by the (male) likes of Zhang Yimou.
 Through Chinese Women’s Eyes |
The problem for our discussion, however, is that in Chinese film — particularly in the Fifth Generation Mainland films, which apparently ignore bourgeois Western feminism — the ideological tensions between Eastern and Western feminism have often been trumped by visual splendor and depictions of melodramatic female suffering. While representations of feudal suffering were a common tool used by Republican revolutionaries and anti-Confucian Maoists alike to critique Third World primitivism, the persistence of this aesthetic has in film submerged any kind of gendered politics beneath a commodifiable aesthetic of cinematographic prettiness, in which the systems under critique are paradoxically presented romantically, nostalgically, in a word, sexily. Of course, generic images of female suffering are common throughout classical East Asian cinema, as evidenced by Mizoguchi’s ever-suffering heroines, whose proto-feminisms the Japanese new wave, attempting to escape the straitjacket of feudalist aesthetics, considered needlessly romantic. But while I refuse to characterize suffering as an aesthetic particularly "Asian" or feminine, I must still contend with the kind of oriental imagery promulgated by Zhang Yimou, which has fostered an internationally recognized trope of prettified female suffering, and which — ignoring both Western feminism and Chinese Mulan-ism — has been incapable of saying anything innovative about women’s problems in premodern China. If feminism should critique the tyranny of the physical appearances that preserve male and female as biologically exclusive and unequal terms, might it not be ironic for a film — such as Zhang’s Raise the Red Lantern — to purportedly critique patriarchy while burying its themes beneath the similarly exclusive physical appearances of high-class cinematography?
Raise the Red Lantern
It is not a simple thing to renounce suffering: as entire cultures are founded upon aestheticizing it (Christianity), and others are founded upon shunning it (Buddhism), it remains forever the lowest — and perhaps only — common denominator of universal human experience. As such, suffering has been an indispensable impetus for artistic expression, from Sophocles to Arthur Miller, from Rigoletto to Bessie Smith, from Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) to the Indian classic Pakeezah (1971). But let us — if only for the moment — try to quit cold turkey the defeatist aesthetic of suffering, and instead see film as the expressly political tool it must be, and has always been. The pathos of suffering will always have its noble place as long as there is tragedy, but what political, feministic good can numbingly repetitive representations of suffering have? If the sarcastic necrology of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet catalogs with embarrassing clarity the boringly self-flagellating masochism that had plagued pre-Stonewall cinema, why should the lushly photographed fatalisms of films as recent as Thelma and Louise or Red Lantern constitute a legitimate feminism? While we shouldn’t embark on campaigns of naive, freshly scrubbed optimism, the aesthetic of (female) suffering has unfortunately beatified meekness, turning what could at best be martyrdom into self-pacifying euthanasia. People will defend the art of suffering by saying, "At least it is realistic — that is what life is really like!" But I will say, "What good is your mediocre realism if it offers no revelation, no original instruction, and feebly aims to make a grand statement by concluding with the suffering that we already accept as a priori universal knowledge?"
It is now seemingly impossible to comment on the image of (suffering) women in rural Chinese films without placing that commentary within a frame of orientalism and transnational consumerism. E. Ann Kaplan (1991), Rey Chow (1995), Dai Jinhua (1999), Chris Berry (1999), and legions of others have already commented on the commercial appeal of the Fifth Generation Chinese films to First World audiences.4 Often, these are rural narratives that romanticize a resplendent aesthetic of rural female suffering as an exportable vision of a China framing its premodern rural history as an international cinematic commodity. As Chow says:
"…the Chinese films that manage to make their way to audiences in the West are usually characterized, first of all, by visual beauty. From Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) to Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Horse Thief, to Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1988[sic]), Judou (1989), and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), we see that contemporary Chinese directors are themselves so fascinated by the possibilities of cinematic experimentation that even when their subject matter is — and it usually is — oppression, contamination, rural backwardness, and the persistence of feudal values, such subject matter is presented with stunning sensuous qualities." (54)
Elsewhere, Mainland critic Dai Jinhua has argued that because Zhang Yimou has orientalized himself for a Western audience, he assumes a passively feminine position. (1999, 201) That is, just as Western viewers gaze at a mad Gong Li imprisoned within the patriarchal house of Red Lantern, so do we envision a flailing Zhang Yimou trapped within the Western patriarchy and economics of international film distribution. Yet if we really insist on narrowly identifying artists according to passive-aggressive or female-male binaries, we might also say that because Zhang’s films are actively prestigious and economically profitable — and as far as "foreign" films go, these are more prestigiously profitable than most — Zhang’s work can just as easily be coded "male" or "aggressive."5 We are then given to wonder that, no longer passive sheep in the post-Mao framework of transnational exploitation, Chinese directors have become complicit in objectifying themselves to and for a Western audience, and have in fact derived elitist auteur status from this complicity. But even if there is some convenience in this commonly perceived East-West/female-male binary, it, as we will see, fails to account for the physical beauties of rural Chinese films that do not make their way to the West, films whose exoticisms are intended for modern Chinese audiences who in the post-Mao era might be reconsidering the values of the premodern culture overanxiously erased during the Cultural Revolution.
Rey Chow has defended Zhang Yimou against Chinese intellectuals, such as Dai Jinhua, who accuse him of selling out to the orientalist gaze by arguing that his emphases on comely, over-composed surfaces are not tricky diversions from "real" meanings that don’t exist, but are meaningful as a sort of "genuine" superficiality, as a semi-deliberate parody of the Western gaze, an "oriental’s orientalism" that tries to juggle self-identity and national identity in a post-imperialist, poker-faced struggle to go beyond the two. While such a self-conscious parody would complicate an attempt to reduce Zhang’s position to "passive" or "feminine," and while a sense a self-consciousness is indeed probably present in Zhang’s later films, such as Red Lantern and The Story of Qui Ju (1992), it seems unlikely that this argument can explain the excessive prettiness of Red Sorghum, for in 1987 the value of the Fifth Generation’s "stunning sensuous qualities" had not yet been fully established as an international commodity ripe for parody. But even if we tentatively accept Zhang’s films as self-parodies, I am not convinced that such non-confrontational parodies are actually effective, for they are so deeply encoded within the oriental aesthetic they allegedly rebel against that they can be mistaken for authenticity — even Chow admits that urban Chinese probably wouldn’t know exactly how accurate are the rural rituals that Zhang "parodies." I would say that parody, hardly a salvation in itself, is rather the obligatory curse of transnational consumerism, a mundane curse that dumbly points out the circuitry of the cross-cultural gaze without being able to disrupt it.
 Raise the Red Lantern |
Furthermore, if we consider the decidedly unintentional oriental’s orientalism of Joan Chen’s Mainland melodrama Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998), we see that female filmmakers can be equally guilty of perpetuating the aesthetic of female suffering advanced by male directors. Though banned in Mainland China6 and directed by a Westernized Chinese filmmaker propagating pro-democracy ideas Zhang Yimou would not, Chen’s Anglicized feminism falls flat under the weight of its oriental prettiness, its seven Taiwanese Golden Horse Awards notwithstanding. Its narrative is cardboard determinist fatalism: an overly pretty Young Communist with an ironically red kerchief is raped by a Chairman Mao look-alike, and dies a silent, maddened martyr at the hands of a Cultural Revolution more interested in lining its pockets and paying deference to privileged families than Marxist ideals. Painted over with lovely countryside visuals, Xiu Xiu’s feminism is drawn only in witless caricature: the only "good" male character is impotent, the camera consciously demonizes the male gaze (when the heroine is bathing), and the heroine, under the guise of the tearfully banal demands of historical realism, must suffer an overdetermined fate as a victim cum martyr. Therefore, this "art film" — aimed at Westerners with capitalist preconceptions of art, such as expensive-looking cinematography — becomes more textually simplistic than, for example, the lower-budget "category 3" feminist films we will consider later, films that do not use nativist or nationalist aesthetics as a pretext to avoid discussing women’s issues more straightforwardly.
Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
Disconcertingly, Joan Chen herself has said she was not attempting to "romanticize" the Cultural Revolution, but rather "poeticize" it — at best a dubious distinction. Referring to her own grandparents’ suffering during the Cultural Revolution, Chen says, "I believe when your experience is more crystallized through distance and time, you’re more able to poeticize something…but I don’t believe beauty exists without suffering…that’s just a tourist picture in a travel agency."7 Yet the overdetermination of the heroine’s suffering combined with stereotypically "poetic" cinematography conspires to reinforce exactly these ideas of transnational political tourism. In fact, the "distance" of Chen’s expensively aestheticized, capitalist images of Communist violence ironically fulfills nothing less than the damning prophesy that concludes Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."8 (1935, 681)
PART 2
What is the Meaning of Orientalism in Non-Transnational
Chinese Feministic Films?
Rather than continue rehearsing the issue of Zhang Yimou-ism, I would like to discuss several types of female-centered Chinese films whose feminisms and images of female suffering are not primarily aimed at Westerners. First, we will consider a concurrence of Chinese films that take as their subject "combed women" (or "comb sisters"), an indigenous tradition of deviant, late Qing marriage resistance practices particular to the region of the Pearl River Delta, a female homosocial tradition often perceived as having homosexual undertones. The three "rural" films I discuss9 — the Mainland Chinese Women Flowers, the Taiwanese The Twin Bracelets, and the Hong Kong Intimates — have not been widely distributed in the West10, and present feminisms seemingly motivated by premodern, collectivized identities rather than Western individualism and egalitarianism. However, as we will see, these nativist films, in spite of their deviant subject matter, persist under the influence of retrogressive romanticism (Women Flowers), obligatory female suffering and martyrdom (Twin Bracelets), and imperialistic Western feminism (Intimates), demonstrating that Chinese films that do not make their way to the West can be equally guilty of the failings and clichés perpetrated by the ones that do. On the other hand, because their rural romanticisms are intended for domestic and not international audiences, these films produce an oriental’s orientalism which cannot be the sly parody Rey Chow suggests, but a sincere — if naïvely nostalgic and arguably self-defeating — desire to reassert a disappearing nationalist aesthetic.
 Intimates |
It is also tempting to read the same-sex undertones of these films as politically transgressive, especially since their non-Western female homosexualities lie outside the frequent male bias of Western gay identity politics. However, both Women Flowers and Twin Bracelets make clear that the homosocial eros shared by marriage-resisting women is merely a defense mechanism against patriarchal violences rather than a proactive sexual choice, implying that gentle heterosexuality would be the utopian ideal. Meanwhile, while Intimates grandly romanticizes lesbian love, the film will uneasily conflate contemporary Western feminism and individualized gay-rights politics with the collectivized, indigenous same-sex culture it takes as its inspiration. Nor are these films compatible with the sexual boundlessness, gender transformations, and biological anarchy promoted by the jargon of Western queer theory. While the butchness of some of the films’ comb sisters may suggest performativity, gender role-playing here is but a one-way street, with females continually sliding toward and from the pole of anchored masculine power.
In her influential article "Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung," Margaret Topley (1975) described the regional practice of young women in the Canton Delta refusing or postponing the Confucian oppressions of marriage, swearing to become virginal "combed sisters" (i.e., spinsters), and earning economic independence through local sericulture industries.12 While Topley’s essay, a product of second-wave Western feminism, tends to read regionally constructed political resistance in terms of personal freedom, Janice Stockard (1989) has since specified different marriage resistance practices whose varying local customs within the Canton Delta inhibit an attempt at a monolithically "feminist" interpretation. Nevertheless, because the comb sisters’ economic independence and traditions of marriage resistance are inherently deviances from Confucian norms, they do promote a kind of radical nativist feminism that predates the May Fourth movement.
However, Women Flowers and Intimates ultimately deemphasize the economic — or "masculine" — aspects of the comb sisters’ lives, and center instead on their individual erotic desires, thus attempting to rewrite a collectivized reaction against patriarchy in terms of individualistic (i.e., modern) desires. While any individualistic, Western feminism in China may raise the specter of imperialism, it should be noted that these Chinese directors are framing their nativist feminisms in the inherently modern, inherently transnational terms of the cinema anyway, just as they may semiconsciously orientalize themselves by indulging in romantically rural subject matter. So while Dai Jinhua suggests that, "Chinese intellectuals put themselves in a difficult position, since they themselves are deeply attached and rooted in the cultural tradition they came to objectify and reject," (192) it is also true that Chinese filmmakers are under no urgent obligation to make films about these rural subjects at all. More importantly, apologies of "deeply rooted" nationalism should not be mobilized to excuse the sentimental unwillingness of artists — or politicians — to fight against their own destructive histories.
Women Flowers
Mainland director Wang Jin’s episodic Women Flowers (1994) tells the fin de siecle story of Guangzhou’s comb sisters, a community of women who protested arranged marriages, formed ritualized sisterhood communities, and wore their hair defiantly bundled in a comb — a traditional marker of the unwed. Initiates in the comb sisters’ society must perform sisterhood ceremonies, where the exchanges of vows and offerings of devotion before the altar parody the heterosexual wedding. However, the bitter matriarch of the comb sisters, the wealthy, vaguely lesbian Miss Sheng, will, for the right price, hypocritically pimp her girls into arranged marriages. While Flowers contains no explicit reference to lesbianism, rosily lit scenes in which Miss Sheng sits on a bed maternally stroking the face of her most prized girl are most likely intended to be coded as such. On the other hand, considering the heterosexual revelation of the film’s finale, Miss Sheng cannot be lesbian in the modern, Western sense of autonomous self-identity.13 It would seem that the identification of Miss Sheng as a lesbian contributes to the generic confusion created by the sexual ambiguity of these homosocial sisterhoods, where lesbianism is more a suspicion than a fact. This confusion is further abetted by the very cautious language of scholars. For example, Topley coyly notes that "several sources refer to lesbian practices in connection with sisterhoods" (76) and that "several [of her] informants expressed a distaste for heterosexual relations," (79) and Bret Hinsch (1990) offers "heterosexual chastity" and "economic and social independence" (177-178) as reasons for rural Chinese lesbianism even as he admits that "the related hairdressing ritual of the Guangzhou region seems to have been primarily nonsexual." (202n, my emphasis).
One of Miss Sheng’s girls, Ah Di, is bonded in sisterhood to another comb sister, but is soon kidnapped by the husband her deceased parents had arranged for her. Coming to her rescue, Miss Sheng leads a phalanx of comb sisters to confront the husband’s family. As they threaten collective suicide by raising scissors to their willing throats, female suicide becomes equated with the scissors’ implication of castration, for in either instance the husband would be robbed of the chance of producing children and continuing his kinship ties. Intimidated equally by the sisters’ bravado and Sheng’s economic power, the groom’s father instead suggests a scenario Stockard has historically identified as a "compensation marriage," in which the economically independent comb sister appeases the husband by buying him a second wife (or concubine) on the condition that she needn’t cohabit with him. After these arrangements are made, however, Ah Di is surprised to discover the secret fondness she harbors for the unexpectedly decent groom, who even offers to voluntarily castrate himself should he misbehave (though he admittedly fails to follow through when it eventually happens).
This shifting emphasis on the comb sister’s individual eros — as opposed to the economic independence afforded by her collectivized comb sister identity — is crystallized when the camera acquires an overly conspicuous female gaze. Ah Di’s eye-line match peeks at the groom bare-chested and in close-up at a local dragonboat festival, at which point she discovers being a sex-starved, crypto-lesbian comb sister is not all it's cracked up to be. But while a traditional Western feminist reading might applaud the camera privileging female desire, these heteronormative eye-line matches not only refute the homosocial eros of the sisterhoods but stereotypically feminize Ah Di to such a degree that she loses the (relative) independence comb sister economics imbued her with. Indeed, in the film’s finale, a passive Ah Di must be rescued by the decent groom, as she sacrifices any agency she has for a damsel-in-distress role — in both homosocial and heterosexual scenarios, she still needs rescuing, either via Miss Sheng or the groom. While Women Flowers does demonstrate that homosocial comb sister conventions can be just as stifling as those of Confucianism, the contrived inclusion of the saintly husband will leave Ah Di little choice but to retreat into heteronormative submissiveness.
Wanting to violate the nonsexual terms of her compensation marriage and break with the barren comb sisterhood, Ah Di faces the threat of drowning by masculinized Miss Sheng, just as the rebellious women of Wang Jin’s earlier Village of Widows (1989) face drowning at the hands of patriarchy for engaging in premarital sex. Deceiving the comb sisters, the husband impersonates Ah Di’s executioner, and they manage to flee the village before their romantic transgression can be punished. But after the lovers disappear, the plot tellingly fixes on Miss Sheng, who must now confront the former flame who jilted her and who now returns asking her to supply him with a concubine. The climactic centering of Miss Sheng allows us to see that the problem is not resolving the symptomatic tension between Ah Di’s individual desires and her collective identity, but eliminating the gender binaries that manufacture such tensions, for Miss Sheng still performs as an exploiter of women and thus reproduces male economies of power. Indeed, the gender "performativity" generated by Sheng’s lesbianism is really more economic than sexual — to put it more ridiculously, she is a "lesbian" in the eyes of the film only insofar as she is a profiteer. Enraged by the old lover’s insolence and realizing she has remained a reactionary pawn with delusions of female power, Sheng climactically immolates the comb sisters’ altar and roams the country as a madwoman.
While Wang Jin’s confused melodrama is still more multilayered than Zhang Yimou’s "parodic" Red Lantern, the film is as ultimately as impotent as its heroine to advance beyond the either/or fallacy of the neurotic Mulan woman, whose agency exists in inverse proportion to her heterosexual passivity. In a sense, Ah Di and Miss Sheng represent complementary halves of the Mulan subject position: Miss Sheng is the neurotically masculinized half, denying her "inner" heterosexuality so long that when its repressed specter (i.e. the former flame) finally returns she has little choice but to go mad; while Ah Di stands for the inner "real" woman — whose "reality" is equated with passivity — struggling to assert an individuality which here becomes coded as and subsumed by heterosexual love. However, this unofficial incarnation of Mulan-ism is not the burgeoning, though awkward, modernity of May Fourth’s urban intellectual elite, but a rural dead-end. As Ah Di’s rediscovers her heterosexuality, she regresses into premodern helplessness, while the deviant socioeconomic powers of Miss Sheng’s "economic lesbianism," having no rightful place within rural Confucianism, become identified with outright insanity.
Although championing individualist and subjective desire over group desire, Women Flowers must — on the dull pretext of historical realism — present the collectivity of the comb sisters not as a forward-thinking solidarity or as an emancipation from gendered oppressions, but merely as a neurotic symptom of patriarchy and the masculinism that underpins it. Further, the film refutes the idea of the sisters’ economic independence even before the issue is raised, as moralizing opening titles explain that "…the maintenance of [the comb sisters’] unmarried status had never brought to them the happiness or freedom they expected." Even in its very first scenes, the film portrays the women’s industrial working conditions as an institutional barbarity equal to arranged marriages, once again overdetermining the aesthetic of suffering under the aegis of an aesthetic of historical realism. The downplaying of the sisters’ economic independence also has the effect of scrubbing from them the pathological stench of Mulan-ism or "unnatural" maleness, as the impossible burden of masculinity is placed entirely on the shoulders of Miss Sheng.
While transnational Xiu Xiu or Raise the Red Lantern may peddle postcards of China to the West, it is also true that the subdued lyricisms and moderately pretty cinematographies of middle-budget films such as Women Flowers romanticize and exoticize a premodern Chinese past for a domestic Chinese audience still recovering from the Cultural Revolution and hopefully climbing towards First World transnational capitalism. Because the film tackles the issue of the Mulan woman in a premodern context, before she came to be standardized by Maoism, its deconstruction of Mulan-ism can undo the "damage" done to women during the Cultural Revolution, returning to them the essential (hetero)sexuality they exchanged for modernity, while taking back the economic power that was not theirs to begin with. At the same time, the film can romanticize the innocent, premodern context to which these gender contentions have been relocated. Therefore, the film’s feminism — whether one wishes to define it as regressive or not — is intractably caught between transnationalist progress and nationalist nostalgia, as rural premodernity becomes the site of both feminist critique and anti-Mao romance, as nativism becomes a reflexive tool with which nativism itself must be fruitlessly attacked.
The Twin Bracelets
 The Twin Bracelets |
As pubescent girls, they defensively enact a homosexual parody of the marriage rite: "We vow as sisters to be man and wife." Four years later, Hsui must join the stranger to whom she has been betrothed, but as the two girls share a bath, a threatened Hui-hua reiterates their earlier vow: "Which is the closer relationship? That between man and wife or that between sisters?" The internal irony of this exchange lies in the pragmatic realization that, unlike the conflation of heterosexual marriage and sisterhood implied by their original vow, now "man and wife" and "sisters" emerge as two separate categories. But as their close proximity in the steamy tub brings the obvious lesbian undertones of their feminism to the fore, they finally exchange the titular bracelets that will bond their hearts.
In a rebuff of the man-hating scenario we are led to expect, Hsui’s arranged husband turns out to be a handsome saint — exactly as in Women Flowers — and the two fall in love; Hui-hua’s parents, however, pawn her off to a local bully in exchange for his sizeable dowry. The film ends with a pregnant and thus futuric Hsui boarding a modern bus — a shockingly incongruous sight in a film that otherwise does not seemingly occur in our "modern" times — and returning to Hui-hua her bracelet for eternal keeping. Understanding that a better life lies ahead for Hsui, Hui-hua knowingly accepts the bracelet, denies her meek mother’s wishes to "take care of" her rapist husband, and stoically descends into the suicidal depths of the sea as the sun drops behind her. While it is indeed true that suicide was a well-documented type of rural marriage resistance14, a pretext of unimaginative historical realism does not excuse the film — a voluntary fiction — from perpetuating the self-flagellating aesthetic of suffering. Though an endearing film15, Bracelets nevertheless recapitulates the overly familiar trope of compulsory martyrdom (Hui-hua’s suicide), and, while not homophobic like Women Flowers, its brand of feminist lesbianism, like that of Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996), presents same-sex bonding not as an active choice but as a reactive mechanism whose immediate struggle is not for a better lesbianism, but a better heterosexuality.16
Intimates
 Intimates |
NOTES
1. By the current standards of Western theory, the socially "progressive" humanism for which Wang argues — in which women are considered equal to but distinct from men — is clearly insufficient, for it presumes a heterosexual bias. Indeed, while Wang forcefully argues for an emphasis on women’s political issues, she ignores not only the homosexuality her Mulan scenario potentially suggests but any hint of Chinese lesbianism. Of course, as a Mainlander, this might be a case of self-censorship.
2. This alternation is clear in one of the best-known Chinese film versions of the Mulan story, Feng Yuek’s Lady General Hua Mulan (1964), starring famed female transvestite performer Ivy Ling Po. Here, Mulan’s power is signaled only by her cross-dressing; in the end, when she returns to traditional feminine vestments, she also surrenders to female passivity.
3. For example, even as well-regarded a film as Huang Shuqin’s Woman-Demon-Human (1987) remains currently unavailable on U.S. home video.
4. I agree with Chow’s critique of Kaplan, who emphasizes the "dangers" of cross-cultural analysis to an unnecessary degree. Still, Kaplan, as well as Berry, cautions against reducing all Western appreciation of Chinese cinema to an overly convenient common denominator of orientalism.
5. The North American success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) certainly apotheosizes this idea, as the film’s self-parodic imagery both caters to the orientalist gaze and exploits that gaze for prestige and profits that cannot be easily dismissed as "passive." The recent Hollywood trend of gracelessly plagiarizing Hong Kong martial arts choreography (c.f. Romeo Must Die [2000], The Musketeer [2001], etc.) further conspires to economically "masculinize" orientalism.
6. Mainland Chinese censors unconvincingly claimed they banned the film not for its political content, but because it was filmed in Tibet without a permit. Meanwhile, the cover of the U.S. DVD of Xiu Xiu, using the ban as part of its ad campaign, features the titillating banner "Banned in China for Sexual and Political Content," even though the film’s sexual content is tame, and its political content is far less scathing than, for example, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993), and far less imaginative than the political satires of Huang Jianxin.
7. From an untitled "Indiewire" interview with Joan Chen, conducted by Augusta Palmer. See http://www. indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Chen_Joan_990506.html. Downloaded March 31, 2001.
8. To stretch the point, the same argument could be used against Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and a host of films that attempt to come to terms with historical realities through the use of deliberately aestheticized, elitist ("of the first order") imageries. On the other hand, we have grown so alienatedly inured to enjoying our own destruction that Benjamin’s point has long since become both blatant and moot.
9. These three films actually fall into a small subgenre of late 1980’s/early 1990’s rural films about premodern female marriage resistance. This subgenre also includes Mainlander Wang Jin’s Village of Widows (1989) and The Girls to Be Married (1990), and Taiwanese director’s Yeh Hung-wei’s slightly better-known Five Girls and a Rope (1991), the latter two films both adaptations of Ye Weilin’s group-suicide tale Wuge Nuzi he Yigen Shengzi ("Five Girls and a Rope").
10. While each of these films has received limited exposure at Western festivals or university screenings, none of them has received significant U.S. theatrical or video distribution, as of this writing.
11. In all three of these "homosocial" films, sequences of same-sex ritual bonding are unfailingly presented with romantic orange-hued filters and sexily yellowed lighting effects, thus cinematically "lesbianizing" same-sex ritual bonding, even though actual homosexual intercourse in Twin Bracelets and Women Flowers is left ambiguous.
12. For an analysis of the sericulture industries that granted combed women (some) economic independence, also see Janice Stockard’s Daughters of the Canton Delta.
13. Nevertheless, the few English-language plot synopses of Women Flowers I have read emphasize the fact that Miss Sheng is a "lesbian." For example, see a University of Waterloo Chinese film festival guide at www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/fsoprog7.htm. Downloaded March 31, 2001.
14. For an account of suicide as a form of rural marriage resistance, see Margery Wolf’s "Women and Suicide in China," in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Wolf and Roxane Witke. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.
15. In fact, Twin Bracelets is so endearing that it won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 1992 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, even though the film (ironically) does not ultimately endorse lesbian identity.
16. Director Huang’s recent Spring Cactus (1999) has placed themes similar to those of Twin Bracelets within a contemporary urban context, as two girls of disparate class backgrounds suffer through teenage rebellion, drug abuse, and prostitution in cutting-edge Taipei. Yet the upper-class girl is "rescued" by her overprotective parents early on, and we thereafter see only the lower-class girl’s story; unlike Hui-hua in Bracelets, she is not allowed to mercifully euthanize herself but must spectacularly wither away for another ninety minutes. Though (or perhaps because) its story was culled from the real case file of a Taiwanese social worker, and though highlighting the class issues often submerged in feminism, the film’s belated climactic martyrdom imparts neither revelation nor enlightenment. Therefore, merely relocating the same feminist clichés to a contemporary urban context does not redress the aesthetic of suffering endorsed by the rural films — it merely places those clichés above particular socio-historical contexts.
17. Intimates exists in two versions: the 117-minute domestic HK version, and a 158-minute "director’s cut" very briefly shown at international festivals. My comments pertain only to the commonly available HK cut.
18. For a discussion of these intergenerational queer films, see Grossman, "The Rise of Queer Identity and the Dawn of Communism in HK Film" in Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, ed. Grossman. Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2001.
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