Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues [1 ed.] 9789888313518, 9789888208852

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Peking Opera Blues “A rich and original study of one of the visionary director’s most acclaimed films. Tan See Kam’s knowledge of Peking opera traditions and the ‘three women’ tradition in Chinese cinema provides indispensable contexts for understanding Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues.” —Karen Fang, author of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow

The challenge to a single definition of “Chinese” is also embodied by the playful pastiches of diverse materials. In a series of intertextual readings, Tan reveals the full complexity of Peking Opera Blues by placing it at the center of a web of texts consisting of Tsui’s earlier film Shanghai Blues (1984), Hong Kong’s Mandarin Canto-pop songs, the “three-women” films in Chineselanguage cinemas, and of course, traditional Peking opera, whose role-types, makeup, and dress code enrich the meaning of the film.

Tan See Kam is associate professor of film studies at the University of Macau. He is chief editor of Asian Cinema and chair of Asian Cinema Studies Society. He co-edited Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (HKU Press, 2010). Film Studies / Cultural Studies

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

TAN SEE KAM

In Tan’s portrayal, Tsui Hark is a filmmaker who makes masterly use of postmodernist techniques to address postcolonial concerns. More than a quarter of a century after its release, Tan shows, Peking Opera Blues still reverberates in the present time.

TSUI HARK’S

Peking Opera Blues TAN SEE KAM

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Part historical drama, part thriller, and part comedy, Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986) invites—if not demands—examinations from multiple perspectives. Tan See Kam rises to the challenge in this study by first situating Tsui in a Sinophone context. The diasporic director explores different dimensions of “Chineseness” in the film by depicting competing versions of Chinese nationalism and presenting characters speaking two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin. In the process he compels viewers to recognize the multiplicities of the Chinese identity and rethink what constitutes cultural Chineseness.

TSUI HARK’S Peking Opera Blues

TSUI HARK’S

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tsui hark’s

Peking Opera Blues

The New Hong Kong Cinema series The New Hong Kong Cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the nouvelle vague, and the German cinema of the 1970s and, we can now say, the New Hong Kong Cinema. If this cinema grew increasingly intriguing in the 1980s, after the announcement of Hong Kong’s return to China, it is largely because it had to confront a new cultural and political space that was both complex and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were uncannily overlaid with those of globalism. Such uncanniness could not be caught through straight documentary or conventional history writing: it was left to the cinema to define it. Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to an end? However we answer the question, there is a need to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong cinema. This series distinguishes itself from the other books on the subject by focusing in-depth on individual Hong Kong films, which together make the New Hong Kong Cinema. Series General Editors Ackbar Abbas, Wimal Dissanayake, Mette Hjort, Gina Marchetti, and Stephen Teo Series Advisors Chris Berry, Nick Browne, Ann Hui, Leo Lee, Li Cheuk-to, Patricia Mellencamp, Meaghan Morris, Paul Willemen, Peter Wollen, and Wu Hung Other titles in the series Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs—The Trilogy Gina Marchetti Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile Audrey Yue Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian Wendy Gan Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong Esther M. K. Cheung John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow Karen Fang John Woo’s Bullet in the Head Tony Williams John Woo’s The Killer Kenneth E. Hall Johnnie To Kei-Fung’s PTU Michael Ingham King Hu’s A Touch of Zen Stephen Teo

Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting’s An Autumn’s Tale Stacilee Ford Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s He’s a Woman, She’s a Man Lisa Odham Stokes Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage Mette Hjort Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain Andrew Schroeder Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Wimal Dissanayake Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together Jeremy Tambling Yonfai’s Bugis Street Kenneth Chan Yuen Woo Ping’s Wing Chun Sasha Vojković

TSUI HARK’s

Peking Opera Blues Tan See Kam

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2016 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-86-9 (Paperback) ISBN 978-988-8208-85-2 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by CTPS Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

In fond memory of my parents: Wong Tock Lan 黃淑蘭 (1920–1991) Tan Yeok Book 陳學文 (1917–1993) who loved movies and understood my passion for them

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

List of Tables

xi

Series Preface

xii

Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Setting the Scene

1

Act 1  Story and Structure

30

Act 2  Warlords, History, and the Democratic Dream

85

Act 3  Shanghai and Peking Blues: Fiction as Imagined History 103 Act 4  The Shadowplay of Attractions and Painted Faces

119

Act 5  Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies 148 Postscript 190 Credits 197 Glossary 200 Filmography 213 Bibliography 217

Illustrations

Shot 1A (Table 2a): Ling Pak-Hoi senses danger behind him. Shot 1B (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi turns around (and sees his three attackers). Shot 1C (Table 2a): “Dali” glares at Pak-Hoi. Shot 1D (Table 2a): Soldier 1 makes a move at Pak-Hoi, holding a knife. Shot 2A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi throws a punch at Soldier 1. Shot 2B (Table 2a): Soldier 1 crashes against a wall. Shot 2C (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi throws Soldier 2 over his shoulders. Shot 2D (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi grabs “Dali.” Shot 3A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi punches “Dali.” Shot 3B (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi punches “Dali” again. Shot 3C (Table 2a): Soldier 1 gives Pak-Hoi a flying kick from behind. Shot 3D (Table 2a): The kick sends Pak-Hoi into the air. Shot 4A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi glides over the vintage car. Shot 4B (Table 2a): The steering wheel breaks Pak-Hoi’s fall. Shot 4C (Table 2a): Soldier 1 leaps into the air.



Shot 4D (Table 2a): Shot 5A (Table 2a): Shot 5B (Table 2a): Shot 5C (Table 2a):

ILLUSTRATIONS ix

Pak-Hoi gets up. Pak-Hoi blocks off Soldier 1’s attack. Pak-Hoi throws Soldier 1 over his shoulders. Pak-Hoi and Soldier 1 fall off the car together. Shot 5D (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi flips Soldier 1 to the ground. Shot 6A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi cuts Soldier 1 with a knife, while Soldier 2 prepares to attack him. Shot 6B (Table 2a): Tung Man shrieks. Shot 6C (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi stabs Soldier 2 with the knife. Shot 6D (Table 2a): “Dali” reaches for his gun. Shot 7A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi contemplates his next move. Shot 7B (Table 2a): “Dali” points his gun at Pak-Hoi. Tung Man tries to intercept. Shot 7C (Table 2a): “Dali” turns around and shoots Tung Man. Shot 7D (Table 2a): The bullet hits Tung Man’s left shoulder. He crashes against a wall. Shot 8A (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi throws the knife at “Dali.” Shot 8B (Table 2a): The knife pierces “Dali.” Shot 8C (Table 2a): As “Dali” falls backwards, he pulls the gun trigger reflexively. Shot 8D (Table 2a): The bullet makes a hole in the car’s petrol tank. Shot 9A (Table 2a): “Dali” collapses to the ground and die. Shot 9B (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi gets up. Shot 9C (Table 2a): Pak-Hoi notices two shadows on the far wall. Shot 10A (Table 3a): Pak-Hoi is trapped inside the toilet. Shot 10B (Table 3a): Commander Lei lifts the red curtain to enter the toilet. Shot 10C (Table 3a): Pak-Hoi throws a bucket at Commander Lei. Shot 10D (Table 3a): The crowd outside the toilet ducks the bucket. Shot 11A (Table 3a): Warlord Tsao reacts to the commotion.

x

ILLUSTRATIONS

Shot 11B (Table 3a): Shot 11C (Table 3a): Shot 11D (Table 3a): Shot 12A (Table 3a):

Some people fall down the stairwell. Tung Man reacts to the commotion. Pat Neil reacts to the commotion. People in the backstage react to the commotion. Shot 12B (Table 3a): People crash through a railing on the upper floor. Shot 12C (Table 3a): People fall to the ground from the upper landing. Shot 12D (Table 3a): Amongst them is Tsao Wan. Shot 13A (Table 3a): Soldiers form a protective shield around Warlord Tsao. Shot 14A (Table 4): Fa Gum-Sao reacts to Commander Lei’s proposal of marriage. Shot 14B (Table 4): Commander Lei appeals to Fa Gum-Sao to reconsider his marriage proposal. Shot 15A (Table 5): Warlord Tsao prepares to flee. Shot 15B (Table 5): Warlord Tsao and his daughter have a conversation. Shot 16 (Table 6): The bellowing painted face. Shot 17A (Table 7a): Pat Neil sobs under a street lamp. Shot 17B (Table 7a): Tsao Wan consoles Pat Neil. Shot 17C (Table 7a): Tsao Wan grabs Pat Neil’s shoulder. Shot 18A (Table 7a): Snow starts to fall. Shot 18B (Table 7a): The party across the street. Shot 18C (Table 7a): Pat Neil and Tsao laugh heartily. Shot 19A (Table 7a): Bouncers throw Sheung Hung out of the theater. Shot 19B (Table 7a): Sheung Hung shivers in the cold. Shot 19C (Table 7a): Sheung Hung complains about the cold nosily. Shot 20A (Table 7a): Tsao Wan and Pat Neil roar with laughter. Shot 20B (Table 7a): Tsao Wan, Pat Neil, and Sheung Hung walk down the street together.

Tables

Table 1a Story-plot segmentations and narratives Table 1b A summary of the main story Table 2a Narration and editing at a single location: the fight at the garage (thirty-five illustrations) Table 2b The fight at the garage sequence: composition and movement Table 3a Narration and crosscutting across multiple sites in a single location: the chaos in the theatre sequence (thirteen illustrations) Table 3b The chaos in the theater sequence: composition and movement Table 4 The marriage proposal (two illustrations) Table 5 The father and daughter conversation (two illustrations) Table 6 The bellowing painted face (one illustration) Table 7a Hyperrealities in front of Kwok Wo Theatre (eleven illustrations) Table 7b The sequence in front of Kwok Wo Theatre: composition and movement

36 60 67 68 71

71 74 75 81 143 144

Series Preface

The New Hong Kong Cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the nouvelle vague, the German cinema in the 1970s and, we can now say, the recent Hong Kong cinema. If this cinema grew increasingly intriguing in the 1980s, after the announcement of Hong Kong’s return to China, it was largely because it had to confront a new cultural and political space that was both complex and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were overlaid with those of globalism in an uncanny way. Such uncanniness could not be caught through straight documentary or conventional history writing; it was left to the cinema to define it. It does so by presenting to us an urban space that slips away if we try to grasp it too directly, a space that cinema coaxes into existence by whatever means at its disposal. Thus it is by eschewing a narrow idea of relevance and pursuing disreputable genres like melodrama, kung fu and the fantastic that cinema brings into view

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SERIES PREFACE

something else about the city which could otherwise be missed. One classic example is Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, which draws on the unrealistic form of the ghost story to evoke something of the uncanniness of Hong Kong’s urban space. It takes a ghost to catch a ghost. In the new Hong Kong cinema, then, it is neither the subject matter nor a particular set of generic conventions that is paramount. In fact, many Hong Kong films begin by following generic conventions but proceed to transform them. Such transformation of genre is also the transformation of a sense of place where all the rules have quietly and deceptively changed. It is this shifting sense of place, often expressed negatively and indirectly—but in the best work always rendered precisely in (necessarily) innovative images—that is decisive for the New Hong Kong Cinema. Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema come to an end? However we answer the question, there is a need now to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong cinema. During the last few years, a number of full-length books have appeared, testifying to the topicality of the subject. These books survey the field with varying degrees of success, but there is yet an almost complete lack of authoritative texts focusing in depth on individual Hong Kong films. This book series on the New Hong Kong Cinema is designed to fill this lack. Each volume will be written by a scholar/critic who will analyze each chosen film in detail and provide a critical apparatus for further discussion including filmography and bibliography. Our objective is to produce a set of interactional and provocative readings that would make a self-aware intervention into modern Hong Kong culture. We advocate no one theoretical position; the authors will approach their chosen films from their own distinct points of vantage and interest. The aim of the series is to generate open-ended discussions of the selected films, employing diverse analytical strategies, in order to urge the readers towards self-reflective engagements with the films in particular and the Hong Kong cultural space in general. It is our hope that this series



SERIES PREFACE xiv

will contribute to the sharpening of Hong Kong culture’s conceptions of itself. In keeping with our conviction that film is not a self-enclosed signification system but an important cultural practice among similar others, we wish to explore how films both reflect and inflect culture. And it is useful to keep in mind that reflection of reality and reality of reflection are equally important in the understanding of cinema. Ackbar Abbas Wimal Dissanayake

Acknowledgments

This book has been realized through the inspirational assistance and support of the following people who facilitated the work and ideas therein in many different ways: David Birch, Bill K. P. Chou, John Corbett, Michael Duckworth, Earl Jackson, Michael Keane, Sheldon Lu, Gina Marchetti, Eric Mok, Martin Montgomery, Chris Munn, Elliott Shr-tzung Shie, and the two anonymous book manuscript reviewers. My thanks also to the many undergraduate and postgraduate students of English, Film, and Communication I have had the privilege to teach and get to know well: in ways large and small they have helped determine the direction and content of this book. Prominent among them are Jiang Wei, Ives Shen Chen, Richard Xu Xiaying, Sofi Yang Shanhong, Zhang Bing, Garland Zhang Guonan, and Sherry Zhang Xiaoyi, as well as my two wonderful research assistants, Tony Ding Junxiao and Wade Qin Yan. My heartfelt appreciation likewise goes to the Research Development and Administration Office, University of Macau, for granting me a generous Multiple-Year Research Grant and also for approving my sabbatical leave of 2012 which allowed me to take up a visiting



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvi

fellowship at the Faculty of Creative Industries of the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, where I began working on this book: thank you Vice-Rector Ruis Martins, and also Rebecca Wong and Bonnie Tin for guiding me through the administrative maze. Last but not least, I am ever grateful to my family for simply being there whenever I need care and comfort, especially my son, Chen Xingsong, for teaching me the joys of life, as well as to my dear friends, Alan Chen Zhenyong, Li Ying, Merliza Mhay Manalac, Su Qinyang, and Zhao Yongsheng, for life’s reality checks.

All revolutionaries are romantic. Without being romantic, who would come to start a revolution?1 I take Chinese history with a grain of salt.2

1. Jiang Guangci, cited in Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 273. 2. Tsui Hark, cited in Sam Ho and Winnie Fu, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark: Three Hong Kong Film Archive Interviews,” in The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark and Hong Kong Film, eds. Sam Ho and Ho Wau-Ieng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002), 190.

Introduction

Setting the Scene

I was working on the drafts for this book, for the umpteenth time, when the Hong Kong Police launched tear gas and pepper spray at the crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators who surrounded the government headquarters in Admiralty in downtown Hong Kong, on September 28, 2014. The demonstrators fended off the offensive with umbrellas. The attempt to disperse the peaceful crowd backfired. It further angered the demonstrators. They regrouped, while supporters rushed to join them. In the days that followed, the numbers of protesters grew from hundreds to thousands, eventually swelling to the tens of thousands, variously and collectively calling for free elections, an end to police violence, and the resignation of the city’s chief executive, Leung Chun-Ying, who had consistently deemed the rallies as unlawful. The gathering eventually morphed into the street occupations that later become known as the Umbrella Revolution or Umbrella Movement.1 The 1. Chris Yeung, “Don’t Call Hong Kong’s Protests an ‘Umbrella Revolution,’” The Atlantic, October 8, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2014/10/dont-call-hong-kongs-protests-an-umbrella-revolution/ 381231/ (accessed May 1, 2015).

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humble umbrella thus became a symbol of defiance and resistance against the Hong Kong government; it also represented grass-root objections to the Beijing decision, or more particularly, that of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on August 31, 2014, that Hong Kong residents be allowed to elect their Chief Executive in 2017 but on the condition that eligible candidates be vetted and endorsed by the nominating committee appointed by the Central Government in Beijing first. Protesters saw the backpedaling as tantamount to a skirting act, regarding it as discordant to the “one country, two systems” framework stipulated under the Basic Law for governing the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and also with the “international standards for universal suffrage.” For them, anything short of free and fair elections that allowed the electorate to nominate and thence vote for candidates of their choice was “fake democracy.”2 Leung’s government stood with the Beijing decision; so protesters were also venting anger and frustration against a government for compromising the city’s autonomy, interests, and freedoms. Tents sprouted in Admiralty and the street occupations soon spread to Central and Causeway Bay, as far as the working class district of Mongkok in the Kowloon Peninsula, across Victoria Harbour from Admiralty. Yellow ribbons, and their variants such as yellow umbrellas (variously signaling dismay, outrage, 2. Martin Murphy, “Hong Kong’s Simmering Revolt Against Fake Democracy,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 7, 2014, http://fpif.org/hong-kongs-simmering-revolt-fake-democracy/; Robert Olsen, “Hong Kong Protestors Reject “Fake Democracy” from China,” Forbes, July 1, 2014, http://www.forbes. com/sites/robertolsen/2014/07/01/hong-kong-protesters-reject-fake-democracy-from-china/; and Keri Philips, “Tracing the History of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement,” Rear Vision, Australian Broadcast Corporation, October 28, 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/tracing-the-history-of-hong-kongs-umbrella-movement/5848312 (all accessed May 1, 2015).



introduction 3

courage, and civil disobedience) became the movement’s emblems. Meanwhile, counter protests from pro-China residents, including the triads, complicated the situation; they used blue ribbons to express support for the Hong Kong Police and their opposition to the Occupy Central campaigns. Occupy Central, advocated by Occupy Central with Love and Peace (or OCLP, formed in March 2013),3 aimed to pressure the PRC Government into granting an electoral system by 2017 which satisfies “universal suffrage” and accords with “democratic procedures.”4 When the negotiations for electoral reforms broke down, OCLP issued an advance notice, as early as March 2014, for the non-violent occupation of Central through civil disobedience means on PRC’s National Day on October 1, 2014. The Beijing decision of August 31, 2014, triggered a week-long boycott, organized by the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) and Scholarism (founded in 1958 and 2011 respectively), which then developed into a series of demonstrations, culminating with student demonstrators storming the Civic Square in front of the HKSAR government headquarters. Among those arrested was Joshua Wong (b. 1996), the convenor of Scholarism, a pro-democracy activist group primarily composed of high school students (unlike HKFS which represented college students). HKFS has, since the 1980s, been supportive of democratic developments in Hong Kong, including the student-led Tiananmen protests of 1989 and subsequent Tiananmen commemoration events in Hong Kong,5 while the rel3. OCLP disbanded in December 2014 after its founders surrendered to the police at the end of the Umbrella Movement. 4. Hong Kong Basic Law. “Article 45,” http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_4.html (accessed May 12, 2015). 5. Yojana Sharma, “Student Federation Faces Uncertain Future in Pro-democracy Battle,” University World News 370, June 13, 2015, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150520094510786 (accessed June 13, 2015). The HKFS represented college students from eight universities; four

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atively newer Scholarism rose to fame when it campaigned against HKSAR government’s attempt to introduce patriotic (pro-Communist) education, or “Moral and National Education,” to the school curriculum; its subsequent protest occupation at the government headquarters, between August and September 2012, eventually forced the government to shelve the plans. Four days after the police fired tear gas at the Admiralty protesters, Occupy Central commenced ahead of the scheduled date of October 1, 2014. OCLP, HKFS, and Scholarism were but three of the key players in the Umbrella Movement, which turned out to be a loosely organized political movement with no discernible leaders. Its participants, ranging from students to professors, from ordinary citizens to community leaders, including laborers and office workers who came to the rallies after work, were nonetheless united in their displeasure at the HKSAR government under the leadership of Leung Chun-Ying, calling for “fake democracy” to be replaced with “real democracy.” While reworking the drafts, it was difficult not to be distracted by these seventy-nine days of ongoing protests: they became an international media event, while my Facebook was constantly inundated with updates and highlights, as well as satirical comments and gossip, so much so that I found myself traveling from Macao of which, namely Hong Kong University, Hong Kong Baptist University, City University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, have, since February 2015, gradually withdrawn from this student alliance when their respective students voted in favor of disaffiliation. Although critics blamed the HKFS leadership for “acting hastily during the protests,” further noting that “HKFS was not even able to wrest any concessions from the Government,” others “see the hand of Beijing in the breakup of the Federation,” noting that “Beijing has made no secret of its anger at the involvement of students and academics in opposing the Hong Kong Government on political reforms.” In 2015, the new HKFS did not take part in the Tiananmen’s 26th anniversary commemoration in Hong Kong.



introduction 5

to Hong Kong one Sunday and wandering around the occupied streets that stretched from Admiralty to Central as well as those in Mongkok and Causeway Bay. In doing so, I reflected on China’s “other long march”—which began with the Republican dream of building a democratic China but which, up to the time of Umbrella Movement, has remained as rocky as ever. This book is not about the Umbrella Movement specifically, nor about Hong Kong in particular, but about a film director, Tsui Hark (a.k.a. Xu Ke), and one of his films, Peking Opera Blues (1986), which, as a Hong Kong New Wave Classic, can be viewed in the larger context of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since the Republican times. These struggles serve as the film’s spatio-temporal setting, and its stories about Republican revolutionaries combating autocratic rule, about politically committed youth seeking social transformations in post-imperial China, and about common, everyday people caught in the tumults of a turbulent time, have considerable political and poignant saliency for contemporary Hong Kong. These are stories apropos to China’s “other long march” towards building a democratic nation. Peking Opera Blues premiered in September 1986, or some seventy-four years after the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912, which saw the demise of China’s centuries-old dynastic rule based on monarchism. The premiere also occurred about two years after the announcement of the Sino-British Joint Declarations (1984) which paved the way for the Chinese resumption of sovereignty, on July 1, 1997, of the colony known as Hong Kong which Britain had ruled since 1842. Peking Opera Blues, set in a turbulent period marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists, would seem to be an enigmatic rebus for renewed interests for democratic developments in the 1980s Hong Kong which subsequently emerged variously demanding political participation in the matter of Hong Kong’s destiny in the run-up to 1997 and beyond. Viewed in this context, I ask here, does

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the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations? This two-pronged question refreshes the conceptual premise for this book, which additionally highlights some of the ways in which a single film may be “read” intratextually, extratexually, and intertextually, in much the same way as a single poem, novel, play, picture, dream, movement, or any other form of textual communication may be examined in detail, by a variety of analytic and stylistic means, in order to more fully open up that text to a closer critical scrutiny, by looking at it from the inside, outside, and through other texts. This entails drawing upon “the deconstructionist impulse . . . to look into one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another.”6 The reasons for wanting to do that are many and various, and differ according to academic disciplines and preferences, pedagogical priorities and rationales, and personal inclinations. Whatever those reasons may be (and mine are made clear throughout this book), any such analysis is always an enabling process—enabling to be more fully understood and to be better contextualized. But in so doing, that opening up may also offer the possibilities for similar analysis of other individual films—not, I hasten to add, as a blueprint for the analysis of all films—but to offer some theoretical and analytic opportunities in the lexicon of the contemporary film student and critic. Any such analysis is always necessarily a subjective one, of course, driven by individual interests and motivations. My particular interest in this monograph lies with the multiple readings of film—from biographical to the formalist, from the historical to the postmodernist—and their value in film analysis and studies. 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Changes (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 51.



introduction 7

Before launching my multiple readings of Peking Opera Blues through the the lenses of deconstruction, intertextuality, and selfreflexivity in the chapters that follow, a biographical sketch of Tsui Hark is in order. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s contributions in cinema, the biography will delineate contexts, considerations, and issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong filmmaking that draw a broad arch for situating my readings, through multiple lenses, of the film.

Tsui Hark the Filmmaker Tsui Hark is a multitalented filmmaker. He has variously produced, directed, scripted and acted in around seventy movies of various genres. His colleagues and collaborators reportedly have a lovehate relationship with him: “Hate because he often makes next to impossible demands . . . Love because those demands are in fact challenges fueled by visionary passion [that bring] the best out of [his co-workers].”7 Otherwise fondly regarded as “the swordsman” who roams the jianghu of contemporary Hong Kong cinema,8 Tsui Hark was born Tsui Man-Kong in 1951, in third world pre-socialist Vietnam, to a large huaqiao family. He reportedly has sixteen siblings.9 Of Cantonese descent, he was raised against a background of internecine wars in his birth country: the nationalist struggle for independence and sovereignty from French colonialism, and subsequent to this, the American-led Vietnam War, which hindered the country’s 7. Sam Ho, “Introduction,” in The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, eds. Sam Ho and Ho Wau-Ieng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002), viii. 8. Ibid., ix. For an elaboration on jianghu, see Tan See Kam, “Shaw Brothers’ Bangpian: Global Bondmania, Cosmopolitan Dreaming and Cultural Nationalism,” Screen 56, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 195–213. 9. Baidu, “Xu Ke,” http://baike.baidu.com/subview/29215/5665981.htm?toSubview=1&fromId=29215&from=rdtself#3 (accessed December 26, 2013).

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unification until 1976. At the age of fifteen, Tsui Man-Kong left for Hong Kong, where he continued his schooling (1966–1969). A year later, the British colony was plunged into social chaos when the riots of May 1967 broke out. As the Cultural Revolution raged across the border, labor disputes in the territory turned into largescale demonstrations against British colonial rule, with leftists clashing with the colonial authorities. In the aftermath, social pressure groups emerged, some demanding the recognition of the Chinese language as an official language, alongside the colonial tongue, English. Connected to the sexual liberation and anti– Vietnam War movements, youth countercultures burgeoned but, as Law Kar points out, the “politicized interest in local affairs” was simultaneous with a “love of Western popular culture.” For Law, the emergent “critical community [of] cine clubs, publications, and experimental filmmaking” laid the tracks for the renewal of the Cantonese cinema in the 1970s (dominated for so long by Hong Kong Mandarin cinema), with the New Wave Hong Kong cinema marking a culminating point before the decade was out.10 Tsui Man-Kong, who was to become closely associated with the cinematic New Wave, left for the United States in 1969. He studied film and television in Texas, and for the most part felt like an “outsider.”11 Known to his friends as King Kong, he became a political activist, and participated in “patriotic” demonstrations against foreign intrusions upon Chinese territories—most particularly the 1971 Diaoyu dispute which erupted when Japanese boats sailed into 10. Law Kar, “An Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther Yau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 32. 11. Tsui Hark, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark: Three Hong Kong Film Archive Interviews,” interviews by Cheung Chi-Sing and Cheuk Pak-Tong (November 11, 1998), Yu Mo-Wan, Janice Chow, Mary Wong, Karen So, and Cynthia Liu (December 10, 1996), and Sam Ho and Winnie Fu (June 29, 2001), trans. Margaret Lee, in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 175.



introduction 9

the “Chinese” fishing zone of the Diaoyu Islands. (Similar demonstrations were held in Hong Kong.) While in the United States, Tsui also took part in the growing anti–Vietnam War protests and civil rights movements. During this time he made “documentaries . . . about American imperialism, ethnic minorities and human-right[s] issues . . . [that] had a distinctive Third World perspective.”12 His political participation, in this way, was redolent of past and lingering experiences; or, as Tsui puts it pointedly in an interview, “I grew up in a colonial environment [and was interested in colonial issues].”13 The political and the personal thus converged in this instance. Around this time, Man-Kong took the name of “Hark,” which in Chinese means “overcoming.”14 After graduation, Tsui Hark moved to New York, where he soon became involved in Christine Choy’s production of From Spikes to Spindles (1976) for the Third World Newsreel, a noted documentary about Chinese immigrants in the city’s Chinatown.15 He also edited a Chinatown newspaper, worked for Chinatown Community Cable TV, and developed a community theater group. In 1977 he returned to Hong Kong, which, by then, was on its way to becoming one of the four economic dragons in the Far East. It was a Hong Kong quite unlike the one Man-Kong left some eight years earlier. At first, he worked for TVB and then for CTV, where he directed the sensational Golden Dagger Romance (1978), a nine-episode wuxia (warrior-chivalry)16 TV series based on Gu 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 174. 14. Fredric Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider’s Guide to the Hollywood of the East (New York: Miramax Book, 1997), 136. 15. Christine Choy (Cui Minghui), Realism and Ghost Shadows: The Memoirs of Female Director Cui Minghui [Zhenshi yu guiying: Nü daoyan Cui Minghui huiyi lu] (Taipei: Yuanzun, 1998), 97–132. 16. The Chinese term “wuxia” has also been translated as knight-chivalry. Whether in the written form or in film and television, wuxia fiction typically

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Long’s novel. But he was soon to establish his reputation in film as a New Wave director, alongside Yim Ho, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, and Allen Fong. He eventually went on to become known transnationally as the “Steven Spielberg of Asia”17 or “Hong Kong Spielberg.”18 An admirer of Akira Kurosawa among others,19 Tsui Hark made his entry into the Hong Kong film industry via The Butterfly Murders (1979). This period film blends Hong Kong wuxia (warrior-chivalry), Hollywood sci-fi, and Japanese popular culture, from manga to samurai films. Since that time, his movies—regardless of format—have traveled far and wide, with uneven impact in home and global film markets. His relative “lack of success in Western countries,” suggests Lisa Morton, the American author of The features chivalrous warriors (both male and female) and is set in ancient China. Personal or factional feuds are a recurrent theme. In battle, the warriors would use traditional weapons such as swords and sabers, though some may additionally have superhuman skills like qinggong, or the ability to glide through the air effortlessly, or shenqi (supernatural) powers that include the ability to throw bolts of fire or thunder with their palms. The wuxia film genre first emerged in Shanghai cinema in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, the Nationalist government banned its production on the grounds that such films promoted superstition and heroic individualism. The genre was to lay dormant until Hong Kong Cantonese film studios revived it in the early 1950s. Their Mandarin counterparts came on to the scene a little later, around the mid-1960s. It would be another decade or so later before Hong Kong television stations started wuxia productions. A most notable example would be Tsui Hark’s Golden Dagger Romance. Nowadays, the wuxia genre is a mainstay of both Chinese-language films and television shows. 17. Glady Hendrix, “Tsui Hark,” Senses of Cinema (June 2003), http://www. sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/tsui.html (accessed February 1, 2007). 18. Richard Corliss, “Tsui Hark’s New Spark,” Time 156, no. 17 (October 30, 2000), http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/2000/1030/tsui_hark. html (accessed February 1, 2007). 19. Tsui, cited in Cheung and Cheuk, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 173.



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Cinema of Tsui Hark, “can probably be boiled down to three main obstructions”: First, unlike much of Jackie Chan’s work, Tsui’s movies tend to be intensely Chinese in theme and design; second, whereas John Woo’s films are almost entirely about men and male bonding, Tsui’s female-driven and transgendered cinema is a tougher sell in Western culture; and third, in contrast to Wong Kar-Wai . . . the Hollywood marketers simply cannot pigeonhole the prolific and versatile Tsui Hark.20

The Butterfly Murders, along with Tsui’s other films such as We’re Going to Eat You (1980), Dangerous Encounters—1st Kind (1980–1981), and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), redefined and renewed contemporary Hong Kong cinema; they gave Tsui Hark the status of a “New Waver.”21 In 1984 he set up Film Workshop, variously producing, directing and scripting such award-winning classics as Shanghai Blues (1984), Peking Opera Blues (1986), the A Better Tomorrow trilogy (1986, 1987, and 1989), the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy (1987, 1990, and 1991), The Killer (1988), Swordsman II and III (1992, 1993), Green Snake (1993), and the six-part Once Upon a Time in China series (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1997). In 1992, he won the Best Director Award for the original installment of the Once Upon a Time in China series at the Hong Kong Film Awards Ceremony. Jenny Lau’s summation of his career during this period is revealing: Tsui Hark . . . almost single-handedly revised and modernized the action genre . . . [He] directly or indirectly launched the 20. Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2001), 1. 21. Law Kar, “An Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” 31–52; Hector Rodriquez, “The Emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave,” in Yau, At Full Speed, 53–69.

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Hollywood careers of John Woo and superstars Chow Yun-Fat . . . and Jet Li. The combined work of these talents has forever changed the cinemascape of Hollywood.22

John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jet Li have indeed worked with Tsui in various capacities, yielding landmark films associated with the Hong Kong New Wave in the final years of the territory’s existence as a British colony. Woo, for example, was the director of A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989), both starring Chow. Li, on the other hand, played the male lead in Swordsmen II and III; Tony Ching Siu Tong, the action director of Peking Opera Blues, was both the Swordsmen II and III films’ director and action director. Li additionally starred in the first three installments of the Once Upon a Time in China series, directed by Tsui, and then again in the series’ sixth installment: Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997), codirected by Sammo Hung Kam-Bo and Lau Kar-Wing. These action-packed films were all produced by Tsui’s Film Workshop. Tsui was also the producer and director of the TV series, Wong Fei Hong (1996). Like the Once Upon a Time in China movies, this TV series was liberally adapted from the legends of Cantonese pugilist-master Wong Fei Hong. It starred newcomer Zhao Wenzhuo, who stepped into Jet Li’s role as Wong Fei Hong in the movie series’ fourth and fifth installments. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty. The occasion coincided with the financial collapse of the Thai baht, precipitating what has been become known as the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998. The Hong Kong film industry hit a slump. Tsui went to Hollywood, where he made two action films, Double Team (1997) and Knock Off (1998), both starring Claude Van 22. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Peking Opera Blues: Imploding Genre, Gender, and History,” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, eds. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 739.



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Damme. But Hollywood turned out to be “a very narrow alley.”23 Around this time, he released Hong Kong’s first animation that combined 2-D and 3-D animation: A Chinese Ghost Story—the Tsui Hark Animation (1997). He also accepted commercial commissions that ranged from drawing the artwork for Ma Wing Shing’s comic book Red Snow (1999) to shooting an episode for the 1:99 (2003) film project composed of a series of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) awareness public announcements for the Hong Kong government’s Information Service Department. In 2001, he produced Herman Yau Lai-to’s Master Q, which was Hong Kong’s first 3-D animation film with live action. He also remade his 1983 classic, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, in collaboration with China Film Co-production Corporation. The remake, The Legend of Zu, dazzles the senses with state-of-the-art special computer effects. It won awards for Best Art Direction and Best Costume and Make-up (Golden Horse, 2001), the Best Special Effects Award (Asia-Pacific Film Festival, 2002), and the Film of Merit Award (Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2002). The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) of the People’s Republic of China oversees the China Film Co-production Corporation (CFCC).24 Founded in 1979, CFCC has been solely responsible for administering affairs relating to Chinese-foreign film coproductions, resulting in notable works such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990), and Wayne Wong’s The Joy Luck Club (1993). CFCC now plays an even more important role in facilitating coproductions as such, especially since the PRC, upon becoming a member the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, has 23. Li Cheuk-to, “Through Thick and Thin: The Ever-Changing Tsui Hark and the Hong Kong Cinema,” in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 14. 24. China Film Co-production Corporation, http://www.cfcc-film.com.cn (accessed May 25, 2015).

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imposed an annual limit on the number of imported films to twenty productions. The import quota applies to Hong Kong productions as much as they do to those made elsewhere, although exemptions are granted to coproductions involving CFCC and other domestic collaborators.25 It is therefore not surprising that Hong Kong filmmakers would henceforth strategically “head north” (beishang), seeking collaborative opportunities with their mainland counterparts who have the added advantage of shared resources in terms of multiple finances, film talents, and local expertise; as a result, this precipitated cross-border productions. In the meantime the film markets in the PRC have grown exponentially, offering a market size that is second only to Hollywood. While maintaining a foothold on home turf with productions like The Era of Vampires (dir. Wellson Chin Sing-Wai, 2002), Black Mask II (dir. Tsui Hark, 2003), and Christmas Rose (dir. Charlie Yeung Choi-Nei, 2013) in addition to Old Master Q, the cross-border (Chinese) productions, as it turns out, gave a much needed boost to Tsui’s otherwise waning filmmaking career when they became huge box-office hits (in the Mainland in particular). Such endeavors have granted location access to places as remote as the deserts in Xinjiang of northwest China, where he shot the award-winning Seven Swords (2005), whose critical success and popular reception have in turn led Ciwen Media (of the Mainland) to finance his production of a thirty-nine-part TV series of the

25. Since 2012, the quota has been raised to 34, of which 14 are reserved for “enhanced” films in 3-D or IMAX formats, including animations. CRI, “China’s Quota Change Heralds Reform,” China.org.cn (February 24, 2012), http:// china.org.cn/arts/2012-02/24/content_24721975.htm (accessed December 26, 2013). See also Sabrina McCutchan, “Government Allocation of Import Quota Slots to US Films in China’s Cinematic Movie Market” (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2013), https://econ.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/sabrina-mccutchan-symposium.original.pdf (accessed May 7, 2015).



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same name.26 He has managed to attract other private Chinese film groups such as J.A. Media, Dong Yang Huan Yu Media, and Beijing Polybona, which coproduced his contemporary comedy, All About Women (2008). Like Peking Opera Blues, the comedy features three female protagonists. Primarily shot in Beijing, it starred mainland actresses Zhou Xun and Zhang Yuqi, with Taiwanese Kwai Lun-mei playing the film’s third female lead. Huayi Brothers, another major Chinese studio, subsequently invested in Detective D (2010) and its prequel, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013). Tsui Hark’s most recent cross-border hit is The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D (2014).27 Coproduced with Beijing’s Bona Film Groups, this 3-D production is a remake of the revolutionary model opera film of the same title, which tells the patriotic story of how a People’s Liberation Army troop vanquished a local tyrant and his army in northeast China. This book is not the place to discuss his most recent film in detail, but suffice it to say that Tsui has refashioned this genre of patriotic celebratory films with genre-mixing that includes themes of heroic valor characterized by purposeful intent and human failing. For Tsui to tamper with the classics (regardless of which kind) is, as this book’s extensive discussion of Peking Opera Blues will show, not out of character. Though uneven, Tsui’s impact on film audiences, Chinese, global, or otherwise, has been widespread. In Hong Kong, Tsui Hark has long indeed been revered as “a rare auteur” who, as intimated above, has managed to rise above the “cut-throat commercial system [which] reigns so tightly [in Hong Kong] that it is hard to imagine the possibility of idiosyncrasy, let alone authorship.”28 Other film critics have praised him for making films that are 26. This film collected two more awards: Best Action Cinematography (Golden Horse, 2005) and Film of Merit (Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2006). 27. At the fifty-second Golden Horse Awards (2015), this film won the Best Visual Effects Award, while Tsui Hark was a contender for the Best Director Award. 28. Lau, “Peking Opera Blues,” 739.

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“very Chinese indeed, referring as they do to Chinese history and culture, a Chinese environment,”29 and, I would suggest, that view of his work constantly demands a rethinking of what constitutes “Chinese” and “Chineseness.” The 16th Busan International Film Festival (2013) adds nuances to this question of Tsui’s political and cultural identity as a diasporic Chinese working in transnational contexts when it honored him with the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award (2013), making him the fifth diasporic Chinese filmmaker to receive such an award—the others being Hou Hsiao-hsien (2004), Edward Yang (2007), and Tsai Ming-liang (2010) of Taiwan, and Andy Lau Tak-Wah (2006) of Hong Kong.30 In more ways than one, transnational Tsui Hark has indeed left indelible cine-prints, not only as a trendsetter for contemporary Chinese-language cinema, but also as a postcolonial Sinophone filmmaker who has operated within a third space of cultural citizenship; for reworking both literary and filmic Chinese classics; and for rethinking Chinese history along a historical-fictional continuum. As such, any study of the cinema of Tsui Hark, including this one, needs to take account of the social, political and cultural contexts of film production in Hong Kong, as changes in these aspects have an influence on a particular film’s content and style. Not only that, they also have an impact on production decisions, distribution modes, and consumption patterns.

29. Stephen Teo, “Tsui Hark: National Style and Polemic,” in Yau, At Full Speed, 148. 30. Karen Chu, “Tsui Hark to Be Honoured as Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award at Busan International Film Festival,” The Hollywood Reporter (September 2, 2011), http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tsui-hark-be-honoredas-230704?mobile_redirect=false Asia (accessed December 26, 2013).



introduction 17

Contexts, Considerations, and Issues This book therefore has five intersecting considerations when situating Tsui’s work in relation to contemporary Hong Kong’s social and cultural scene. The first pertains to the lived reality of British colonialism in Hong Kong, which has offered experiences of poverty, dependency, and subalternity, and paradoxically, also of mobility and other opportunities such as “flexible citizenship.”31 If, as Tsui Hark, a Hong Kong–identified filmmaker hailing from Vietnam who has had high mobility and transnational experiences, has suggested in an interview, the colonial experience has given Hong Kong people of Chinese descent an “inferiority complex” about their ethnic origin, then they need to “liberate [themselves] from this mindset” for two reasons. One, they are “inescapably Chinese, just as Chinese immigrants are inescapably Chinese.”32 Two, they should “take pride in being Chinese” because “Chinese culture is so rich, one benefits enormously with only a cursory connection.” For Tsui Hark, “being ‘Chinese’ is not a political position or attitude, but about cultural origin.” He suggests that it is “not a crime” for Chinese to “[lose] touch with their roots,” but if they do, they would no longer be Chinese.33 That is to say, to be Chinese is an option—even a personal choice—that signals the possibility of an alternative—an “other” terrain of acting and living as citizen-subjects through the interstices of colonial or colonizing frames. Thus Tsui would say, “I happen to be Chinese [and so] feel there is a lot of our [Chinese] culture worth exploring.”34 31. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). See also Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 149–88. 32. Tsui, cited in Ho and Fu, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 190. 33. Ibid. 34. Tsui, cited in Cheung and Cheuk, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 173.

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The second intersection calls forth the contradictory matter of Chinese culturalism in contemporary Hong Kong. Generally speaking, Chinese culturalism would be inimical to the ideological interpellations of political China. Political China would create highly politicized categories of culture, race and citizenry based on “ethnicized reductionism” that homogenizes heterogeneities.35 Chinese political parties are especially prone to do that, especially those that mobilize statist-universalist narratives like “one China, one people” as normative, while conflating the state with the party into a unified whole. For Shu-Mei Shih, these kinds of narratives are in actuality “dominant particulars masquerading as the universal.”36 Whether issuing from the Guomindang (Kuomintang or KMT) of the Republic of China (ROC) or the PRC’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “political China”—as rhetoric or practice—would expectedly downplay ethnic diversities in China on the one hand, and on the other, glosses over cultural differences of Chinese people—both inside and outside China. In this book, Chinese culturalism is thus understood as circumscribing and composing values, practices and traditions of the Chinese-identified people, whether found in mainland China or in the Chinese diaspora, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, but who may not necessarily subscribe to the ideological interpellations of political China. In the particular case of Hong Kong, Chinese culturalism(s), fostered in a colonial environment, have indeed been informed, shaped, and nurtured by competing varieties of Chinese nationalisms that run the gamut of the Confucian (historical China), Socialist (the PRC), Republican or Nationalist (Taiwan), and other forms of identification, including the diasporized (deterritorialized Chinese) kind. That is to say there is not one but many versions of “China” or “Chineseness”—each 35. Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 24. 36. Ibid., 25.



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with its own history of articulations, interpretations and practices.37 Tsui points out the disparity and complexity in the following ways: “the Kuomintang, and [Chinese] Communist Party each [has] its own version,”38 he says firmly in an interview, while noting that the books on or about China that he read while a child or a teenager contain another. For these authors who have mostly once lived in, but later left, China, Tsui notes, the “motherland” is “an illusion that exists only in memory.”39 This “motherland” is in turn different from the Beijing he visited in 1984 as a tourist, which made him realize that Hong Kong’s “Chinese” self-consciousness is distinct to that of other “Chinese” cities.40 Thus Tsui Hark advocates the necessity to “take [official] Chinese history with a grain of salt.”41 Tsui’s filmmaking practices manifest a Chinese culturalism that maps a precarious and problematic relation to political China. This trait is arguably a mark of “Sinophone” filmmakers. Or as Shu-mei Shih puts it: The Sinophone may articulate a China-centrism if it is the nostalgic kind that forever looks back at China as a cultural motherland or the source of value, nationalist or otherwise; but the Sinophone is often the site where powerful articulations against China-centrism can be heard.42 37. See, for example, Shu-mei Shih, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production”; Rey Chow, “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”; Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm”; and Mirana May Szeto, “Intra-Local and InterLocal Sinophone: Rhizomatic Politics of Hong Kong Writers Saisai and Wong Bik-wan,” in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, eds. Shu-mei Shih, Chienhsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 24–52, 43–56, 57–73, and 191–206. 38. Tsui, cited in Cheung and Cheuk, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 173. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Tsui, cited in Ho and Winnie, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 190. 42. Shih, Visuality and Identity, 31.

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In this regard, Peking Opera Blues, to invoke one representative example from Tsui’s prolific corpus, neatly fits the bill. For a start, the film’s original language is Cantonese. At first glance there is nothing remarkable about this at all since Cantonese is not only the lingua franca of Hong Kong but also standard to Hong Kong–made films at the time. But when viewed in the context of the language hierarchy of political China that has privileged standard hanyu (otherwise known as putonghua or guoyu in the PRC or ROC respectively) as the national language of China, the particularizing of Cantonese in Hong Kong film practice underscores “a dynamic of linguistic power struggles” between cultural and political Chinas.43 Marginalized as a “minor language” of political China and relegated to the lowly status of a Chinese dialect, Cantonese accordingly lacks the linguistic prestige and cultural esteem that the institutionalized hanyu enjoys. Yet this minoritized language has endured. Characteristic of the Sinophone in cultural China, it is generative of a “minor literature” that variously resists Chinese domination (whether of the PRC or the ROC kind), displaying “anti-colonial intent against Chinese hegemony,” and ambivalence for the imperatives of political China.44 Tsui’s Sinophone utterances also underscore postcolonial sensibilities. This involves eschewing Chinese nativism that offers “the illusion of cultural virginity” and “the excitement of its possible rehabilitation,” while seeking and articulating “a third space between the colonizer and the dominant native culture,” 43. Ibid. See also Gwynn Guilford, “Here’s Why the Name of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Movement’ Is So Subversive,” Quartz (October 22, 2014), http:// qz.com/283395/how-hong-kongs-umbrella-movement-protesters-are-using-their-native-language-to-push-back-against-beijing (accessed December 4, 2014). 44. Shih, Visuality and Identity, 30. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).



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respectively embodied in British colonialism and the nativism of political China.45 That “third space” questions binary thinking and introduces instead an element of crisis—a crisis which is symptomatized by both the overdetermination and the underestimation of dominant colonial or nativist cultures. It is a mode of articulation, a way of imagining a space of possibility in which oppositional, subcultural, negotiated, and interstitial acts, practices, and discourses, coexist in order to broach questions of identity, self-sufficiency, and self-knowledge.46 Rather than being a “postmodern hybridite”— who, for instance, would “flatten out past injustices” and criticize Chinese nationalism but not British colonialism47—I would argue that Tsui is simultaneously postcolonial and postmodern in practice. As I have shown in my analysis of his works elsewhere,48 and emphasize again here with respect to Peking Opera Blues, Tsui is a postcolonial/postmodern filmmaker who is adept at assembling pastiche, parody, and other postmodern approaches and techniques, yielding hybridized film forms and genres, while engaging with the dominant cultures of Hong Kong’s colonizers. The third intersection concerns the place of late colonial Hong Kong as a globally connected city which enjoyed a living standard comparable to first world countries. Whether as a British colonial 45. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 157. 46. Majorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 11; and Charles T. Lee, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 38, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 57–81. 47. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 155–57. 48. Tan, “From South Pacific to Shanghai Blues,” 13–34; and Tan See Kam, “Surfing with the Surreal in Tsui Hark’s Wave: Collage Practice, Hybrid texts and Flexible Citizenship,” in Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier, eds. Esther Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 33–50.

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trading outpost with a laissez-faire economy and a predominantly Chinese population, as a newly industrializing “Chinese” society under British colonial rule, or as one of the four economic dragons in the Far East, Hong Kong in the 1980s—as before—had at the same time been territory to and for a global traffic in people, ideas, images, cultures, and capital that both fermented and disturbed the territory’s simultaneously local, cosmopolitan, and global tastes and outlooks. This kind of global traffic has, from the beginning, informed and influenced the Hong Kong film industry.49 The fourth intersection concerns the film industry, which is sometimes called the “Hollywood of the East.” It has had a long history of distributing its products to diasporic Chinese communities in the region and beyond; and for a time in the 1970s (and again since the 1990s), reached Hollywood-dominated markets. From the 1980s onwards, the industry has made increasing contact with international film festivals and art-house film circuits beyond the Chinese diaspora, including cinema outlets in mainland China. Access to the mainland Chinese markets has remained relatively unrestricted (except for the period between the 1950s and the early 1980s). In turn, the industry’s multifarious repertoires of filmmaking traditions have, over the years, developed in conversation with and in resistance to both intra and interregional filmmaking practices and cultural influences—be they emanating from the Far East (e.g., mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan), the South (e.g., Australia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian locations), or the West (e.g., the US/Hollywood and Europe). This force of diverse traditions was and still is an issue Tsui Hark constantly engages with, as he carved out his niche as a postcolonial Sinophone 49. Stephen Teo, “Wuxia Redux: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a Model of Late Transnational Production,” in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, eds. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leong Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 192–200.



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filmmaker within the context of what Ackbar Abbas and Wimal Dissanayake have described in this book’s series preface as a “new cultural and political space . . . where the problems of colonialism were overlaid with those of globalism in an uncanny way.” The local in Hong Kong, or in Hong Kong’s self-consciousness, as evident in Tsui’s film corpus, is therefore—and has always been—translocal, transregional, and transnational, in turn problematizing any unified notion of Chinese or Chineseness. The final consideration relates to Tsui Hark’s location within the interstices of competing forces of colonialism, nativist culturalism, Chinese nationalisms, localism, and globalism. These forces have shaped production agendas, marketing strategies, and distribution patterns in one way or another, and so would inform Tsui Hark’s own filmmaking decisions. I take account of all those contexts, considerations, and issues throughout this book. For now, I shall turn my attention to the film’s cast which draws on talents not only from Hong Kong but also elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora such as Taiwan and Canada. This mixture marks Hong Kong’s Sinophone cultural practices in cinema.

The Cast50 Peking Opera Blues took approximately HK$17.6 million at the Hong Kong box office, making it the seventh top-grossing film of the year. In 1987, it received five Hong Kong Film Awards nominations: Best Actress (Sally Yeh Chian-Wen), Best Action Choreography (Ching Siu-Tung), Best Art Direction (Ho Kim-Sing, Leung ChiHing, and Vincent Wai Kai-San), Best Cinematography (Poon Hang-Sang), Best Film Editing (David Wu), and Best Supporting Actor (Paul Chun). It was scripted by Raymond To Kwok-Wai. 50. See the credits in the back matter for a complete list of the cast and crew.

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The three female lead actresses, Sally Yeh, Brigitte Lin ChingHsia, and Cherie Chung Cho-Hung, are all stars of the day. Taiwanborn Canadian Sally Yeh (b. 1961) is a well-known singer of the Mandarin/Cantonese pop music scene and acts as Pat Neil, an aspiring Peking Opera performer. Prior to this, she worked with Tsui Hark in Shanghai Blues (1984). Brigitte Lin (b. 1954), born and raised in Taiwan, is a veteran actress, especially well known for playing the romantic lead in Qiong Yao’s tearjerkers—a staple of the 1970s Taiwanese movie scene. In the early 1980s, she went to Hong Kong where she successfully rebuilt her career. Prior to Peking Opera Blues, she collaborated with Tsui Hark in Golden Harvest’s production of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), playing the female lead role, Jasper Lake Countess, for which she was nominated for the Best Actress Award at the 1984 Hong Kong Film Awards. In 1991, she won the Best Actress Award (Golden Horse) for her performance of Shen Shaohua (a writer) in Yim Ho’s Red Dust. Her other memorable roles include playing a transsexual warrior called Dongfang Bubai in Swords II: The East is Red (1993), produced by Tsui’s Film Workshop (which also made Peking Opera Blues). In Peking Opera Blues, she is Cao Yun, a gynecologist, also a general’s daughter, who enjoys cross-dressing and revolutionary work. Hong Kong-born Cherie Chung (b. 1960), the third runner-up in the 1979 Miss Hong Kong Beauty Pageant, was a model before becoming an actress in 1980. In Peking Opera Blues, she plays a greedy and opportunist musician called Sheung Hung. Prior to this she had appeared in no less than twenty movies. In 1983 she received her first Best Actress nomination at the second Hong Kong Film Awards for playing Fu Min (a young and aggressive career woman in an advertising company) in Stephen Shin Gei-Yin’s Eclipse (Sil-Metropole, 1982). She was a Best Actress nominee again at the Hong Kong Film Awards the following year, this time for her role as an illegal mainland Chinese immigrant in Clifford



introduction 25

Tsai Gai-Gwong’s Hong Kong, Hong Kong (Shaw Brothers, 1983), for which she also received the Best Actress Award nomination at Taiwan’s twentieth Golden Horse Film Awards (1984). In 1988, both the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards nominated her as a contender for the Best Actress Award for her role as an overseas student in New York in Mabel Cheung YuenTing’s An Autumn’s Tale (D & B Films, 1987). Other Hongkongers in the film, Cheng Ho-Nam (b. 1964) and Cheung Kwok Keung (b. 1956), by contrast, were relative newcomers. They have since carved out their respective niches in the Hong Kong film and TV scene. China-born actors, Ku Feng (b. 1930), Kenneth Tsang (b. 1938), and Paul Chun Pui (b. 1945), are veteran actors, as were the late Wo Ma (1942–2014) and Tien Ching (1935–1993), who were also born in China. All five started their professional life in postwar Hong Kong, where they established their careers in acting, appearing in numerous films. In one way or another, these highly versatile actors remain well-respected personalities in the industry. Some have received professional recognition at the prestigious Golden Horse (Taiwan) and Hong Kong Film Awards Ceremony. In 1982, Ku collected the Golden Horse Best Supporting Actor Award for his role as Wu Dalang in Tiger Killer (dir. Lee Han-hsiang, Shaw Brothers, 1982). Five years later, Wo accepted the Golden Horse award for his supporting role as Taoist monk Yan Chixia in A Chinese Ghost Story (Film Workshop, 1987). This horror fantasy was produced by Vietnam-born Tsui Hark and directed by Hong Kong–born Ching Siu Tung (b. 1953); he and Paul Chun were Peking Opera Blues’ respective Martial Arts Director and Best Supporting Actor nominees at the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards. Chun, the youngest of the veteran actors, first made his name as a child actor in Hong Kong’s postwar Mandarin screen. As a young man, he had a more checkered career as an actor. For a time he tried his luck at Lee Han-Hsiang’s Guolian (Grand) Studio in Taiwan, even appearing as a bit-actor in a non-Chinese language

26

TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

film, Robert Wise’s controversial The Sand Pebbles (Twentieth Century Fox, 1966). He returned to Hong Kong in the early 1970s, finding some success in television work. He also accepted some film roles. In 1987, he played a madman called Tsuen in Derek Yee Tung-Sing’s The Lunatics (Media Asia, 1986), which earned him a Golden Horse award (1987) and a Hong Kong Film Award (1987) in the category of Best Supporting Actor, collecting a third at the thirteenth Hong Kong Film Awards (1994) for his supporting role as Uncle Cheung in C’est La Vie, Mon Cherie (Film Unlimited, 1993), also directed by Derek Yee, who walked away with the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay awards.51 Kenneth Tsang’s good looks made him a heartthrob in postwar Hong Kong cinema—at first in 1950s Mandarin cinema and then of the 1960s Cantonese screen. In the 1970s the aging actor turned to television to extend his acting career, while keeping an eye out for film work. Tsang is also fluent in English and, in more recent years, has appeared in Rob Marshall’s blockbuster Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia Pictures, 2005) and other non-Chinese language small budget films such as Adam Kane’s Formosa Betrayed (Formosa Films, USA, 2009), Roseanne Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets (South Pacific Pictures, New Zealand, 2011), and Luca Barbareschi’s Something Good (Casanova Multimedia, Italy, 2013).

Structure of the Book Peking Opera Blues was popular, successful, and star-studded, and this monograph is about the way in which this film might be read and understood through a number of different, though intertextually related, lenses: plot and story; historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and 51. This film garnered two more awards: Best Actress (Anita Yuen) and Best Supporting Actress (Fung Bo-Bo).



introduction 27

Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in the Chinese-language cinema. Through these multiple lens, I seek not only to more fully open up the depths and riches of one single film, but also to show the possibilities of the critical value of intertextual readings of films. This begins in “Act 1” which takes up the more traditional, formalist, approaches to film studies. In this chapter, I give some detail about Peking Opera Blues itself, reading it through the lens of formalism. Through that lens I explore the cinematic codes that give the film its form, including Tsui’s auterist signatures such as cluttered mise en scène and rapid editing style. The formalist approach focuses on the film’s story, style, structure, tone, and imagery; it deploys the methodologies of singular shot, shot-by-shot, and mise-en-scène analyses with respect to compositional and editing matter. This yields a close detailing of the forms of the film, drawing attention to specific cinematic effects and affects. In film studies, formalism generally treats films as autonomous art-objects, and so studies them in isolation from social, cultural, and historical influences. Both historical and postmodern film critics are critical of formalism’s exclusion of subject matter, context, and social values. Traditional historical film criticism emphasizes the historical processes in cultural production and reproduction. This approach has resulted in linear accounts that imagine temporality in progressive terms, periodization in continuous terms, and canonization in eugenic terms. Postmodern studies of topographies of film forms and histories, on the other hand, would challenge these concepts and assumptions as such, arguing, as postmodernist critics do, that historical processes, their very materiality and materialism, would be infinitely more complex, since film form and content can articulate historical ruptures characterized by ambiguity, hybridization, and deterritorialization.

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Rather than engaging with these debates extensively, this book places its multiple readings of Peking Opera Blues on a formalisthistorical-postmodernist continuum. In so doing it sees merits in all three approaches to film studies. Formalism, for example, has the inherent advantage of teaching film researchers, professionals, and students a “grammar” of filmmaking that highlights the formal logic of shot compositions and shot assemblages (that integrates imagery and sound), or the lack thereof. The historical approach sheds light on a different paradigm of narrative logic—that, for instance, pertaining to the filmmaker’s historical situatedness in terms of intentions and choices. Finally, the postmodern approach helps uncover the logic of illogicality that refuses linear temporality and continuous spatialization, highlighting unwieldy contradictions that color ambiguous and parodic scenarios of narration and performance. Wielding a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum as a reading strategy, then (however theoretically contentious such a continuum may be), positions Peking Opera Blues for the opportunities of multiple readings, through multiple lenses of intertextuality, which can reveal the film’s richness in terms of formal textures, textual affects, and ideological influences. In summary then, this monograph contains five acts of reading Peking Opera Blues. Different yet connected, these acts of reading variously and collectively simultaneously deconstruct the film’s textual contours as well as its playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. The first reading act explores story and form through the lens of structuralist narratology. This gives textualized contours to the film’s compositional and narrative techniques and unpacks Tsui’s signatory style in the area of storytelling and editing. Building on this, the subsequent chapters mobilize intertextuality and self-reflexivity as reading strategies that foreground relationality, interconnectedness, and interdependence in textual formations, in order to bring into sharp focus certain narrative and performative elements in this particular film as it relates to modern



introduction 29

Chinese history and literature, traditional Peking opera, and Hong Kong’s Mandarin Canto-pop songs, and also, contextually, to contemporary Hong Kong cinema in general, and to 1980s Chinese/ Hong Kong cultural politics in particular. At the heart of this book, then, is not simply a very popular and well-crafted film, made by a particularly successful and gifted director and featuring famous stars, but a film which, because of its many layers, complexities and intertextual practices, opens up the possibilities of a wide range of critical and intertextual insights. These are not just about the film itself (though they can reveal much about that film); nor are they simply examples of traditional film analysis pertaining to structures and techniques. Rather, they can yield understandings, and sometimes alternative readings, of society, history, culture, and politics, then and now, engendered by the film and its self-reflexive, and often very self-conscious, intertextualities. In the light of the Umbrella Movement, this book claims Peking Opera Blues for China’s “other long march.” One final, but still an opening comment. At the heart of this book, too, is an exploration of the maxim that in matters of intertextuality and generic citation, “No film is an island.”52

52. Tan See Kam, “From South Pacific to Shanghai Blues: No film Is an Island,” in Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, eds. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–34.

Act 1

Story and Structure

Story Featuring a cast of young and veteran actors and actresses, Peking Opera Blues is not only a career highpoint for Tsui Hark as producer and director in the 1980s, but arguably also “a cornerstone of the Hong Kong New Wave cinema”1—of which Tsui is a significant progenitor. Its story revolves around three primary settings: a European-style mansion, a theater called Kwok Wo Building, and the streets of Peiping (Peking or Beijing). There are two unspecified locations, but they are contextually given as situated in Peiping. Peking Opera Blues chiefly narrates the dreams and aspirations of Sheung Hung, Tsao Wan and Pat Neil—the film’s three female protagonists—as they traverse the city of Peiping in the winter of 1913, encountering adventures and misadventures. The three cross paths by accident, with Sheung Hung, an avaricious musician who is eager to get rich, and Pat Neil, the daughter of a Peking opera 1. Julian Stringer, “Peking Opera Blues by Tsui Hark,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 35.



Story and Structure 31

troupe manager whose goal in life is to perform on stage, getting entangled in Tsao Wan’s revolutionary mission. Tsao Wan, a foreign-trained doctor of Western medicine (gynecology), is the daughter of General Tsao, a warlord with his own army. She is an underground freedom fighter who supports the Republican cause. Her father, by contrast, stands with Yuan Shikai, the first president of Republican China (founded in 1912), and in the course of the film, helps the latter secure foreign loans to finance a military buildup for squashing the Republicans. Tsao Wan’s task is to steal the loan agreement contract, which is proof of Yuan’s anti-Republican conspiracy. (Though physically absent from the film, Yuan is a historical figure who has largely been remembered as a powerful warlord who had attempted to restore the monarchist rule with himself as the new emperor.) Her father is less a Yuan loyalist per se than an opportunistic army veteran. As he tells Tsao Wan during a quiet moment in the film (Story-Plot Scenario 9b, Table 1a below2): “I have seen it all. Remember, whatever you do, do it for yourself. That is most important.” But Tsao Wan disagrees: “Father, don’t just care about your own interests.” Instead she urges her father to pay attention to the “big picture” of building a Republican China based on democracy. Shrugging her off, the egocentric father replies curtly, “The big picture? Without me, there is no big picture.” Warlord Tsao clearly has a different personal/political stance. This distinction provides narrative tension and conflict for dramatizing and contrasting Tsao Wan’s “two loves”: her father and her country. Torn between filial love and patriotic love, Tsao Wan eventually chooses the latter, knowing full well that her act of patriotism would amount to an act of betrayal as far as her father is concerned. Pursued by Yuan’s secret police, Tsao Wan and her comrade, Ling Pak-Hoi, 2. Hereafter for the sake of simplicity and brevity, I shall use the term “scenario” when specifically referring to the “story-plot scenario” in Table 1a.

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

through the aid of various friends—Sheung Hung and Pat Neil, the unemployed soldier Tung Man, and Manager Sung, who runs the Minsheng (People’s Voice) Press—finally accomplish their task but, in accordance with traditional Peking (Chinese) opera narrative conventions, succeed only on the third try. Commander Lei works for President Yuan and heads the secret police. After receiving evidence that Tsao Wan is a subversive rebel (luandang), he goes to Warlord Tsao’s home to arrest her. The warlord refuses to believe him and puts up a fight. The commander guns him down and apprehends the daughter. The dragnet also secures Ling Pak-Hoi and Tung Man, whom Lei’s men capture elsewhere in Peiping. Sheung Hung and Pat Neil manage to escape and subsequently rescue their three friends. At the end of the film, Tsao Wan eventually avenges her father’s death. During the climactic rooftop chase, Commander Lei fires at her, hitting her leg. She comes tumbling down, crashing through the rooftop of the adjacent building, where Lei is. A plank under the roof breaks her fall. The impact of her fall then causes the plank to seesaw upwards tossing Lei into the air and over the roof. As Lei comes crashing down to earth, his men fire bullets at him, not knowing that they are in fact shooting at their boss. With Lei dead and the secret document in hand, the movie ends with patriots Tsao Wan and Ling Pak-Hoi heading for the revolutionary headquarters in Nanking (Nanjing). Sheung Hung, Pat Neil and Tung Man, on the other hand, decide to pursue personal goals. The first plans to leave China once she has earned enough money; the second makes up her mind to follow her father’s itinerant opera troupe to Tianjin; and the third decides to return to his home village and become a farmer: “It is better to stay away from the world of chaos for a while,” he tells his friends before they part ways.



Story and Structure 33

Structure Crucial to plot development, story causality, and narrative flow, the narrative threads just outlined clearly intertwine and overlap, variously yielding surprise, confusion, tension, and resolution. According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2001), the plot and story both would typically depict “explicitly presented events,” but are distinct in that the former has “added nondiegetic material” such as credits and extraneous music, whereas the latter alludes to “presumed and inferred events.”3 Peking Opera Blues does not strictly adhere to Bordwell and Thompson’s formulation of a plot-story split. Instead the plot and story spill into each other. The story runs in linear narrative time: it has no flashbacks or flash-forwards. The film ultimately manifests a circular narrative structure that folds the story into the plot. This arises when the closing montage (over which the credits roll) repeats selected shots from the opening credits sequence and the story that follows. In addition to repetitions, the montage also uses cut-offs, that is, shots excluded from the “main story” (see Table 1b), most notably those showing Pat Neil executing elaborate kungfu movements. As will be discussed later, exclusions and repetitions augment the film’s self-reflexivity, generating a postmodern form of metafiction that poses questions about the relationships between the personal and the social, and also between story-telling and technology, fiction and history, artificiality and truth. For now, I will provide a detailed breakdown of the plot, story and narratives of Peking Opera Blues into analytic units as well as highlight the interconnectedness therein and thereof.4 The tabulated information in Table 1a may appear daunting at first sight with 3. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), 62. 4. Here I refer exclusively to Tsui Hark, director, Peking Opera Blues, DVD (Hong Kong: Fortune Star, 1993), 100 mins.

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

its seven columns and thirty story-plot scenarios and narratives (some with numerous subplots), but this is actually a very useful, though more formal, model of the film helping to convey an overall sense of the film’s narrative flow, without actually viewing the movie itself. For students of film, it further offers a template for closely mapping film form and narrative structure as units of analysis. The hour-minute-second time code (in bold Arabic numerals) marks the start time of each scenario, while the parenthesized Arabic numerals chart the scenario’s screen duration (given in seconds). In the “Story-Plot Scenario” column, the scenarios are arranged in accordance with their chronological placement in the film. Apart from the pre-opening (which identifies the film’s production companies) and the opening and closing credits sequences (each carrying a different montage of images over which the credits are superimposed), the other twenty-seven story-plot scenarios use physical locations as points of demarcation—for example, the mansion, the theater and the streets in Peiping—this being the most obvious and convenient way to partition the main story (between Scenarios 3 and 29). They also carry information about the time of action (daytime or nighttime), as well as the time of the first appearance of the film’s main and other narratively significant characters (in Roman numerals). These characters are distinct from their walk-on counterparts, who typically serve as human “props” in the mise en scène. The “PlotStory Narratives” column narrates highlights from the film, pulling out threads (given in lowercase) that give readers ready points of reference in relation to the film. These threads, however, do not always follow the chronology of narrative time. This is because the film frequently uses the crosscutting technique for embedded sequences that sutures simultaneously occurring action or activities at different sites of the same location. In such instances it would be difficult, not to mention tedious, to give a scene-by-scene breakdown of the narration which bounces between sets and settings in rapid successions and jumps. As can be seen in Scenario 5 (among



Story and Structure 35

others), the scenarios shift between various locations at Kwok Wo Building, with the narrative events occurring sequentially or concurrently in front and behind the theater, as well as inside it such as the backstage, front stage (auditorium), on-stage zones and toilet areas. Finally, the table keeps a tab on the number of takes, shots and transitions used in the film. The aim here is to give readers a sense of the film’s structure in terms of shot composition and editing style. In cinematography, a take refers to the “filmed” version of a particular setup that is done continuously until the camera stops shooting. Information regarding the number of actual takes made during Peking Opera Blues’ shooting process is not available. To identify and count the takes mentioned in Tables 1a and 1b below, educated guesses are made based on the actual shots used/seen in the Fortune Star’s DVD version of the film. By shots, I specifically refer to particular culls from each take that compose the final selection during the post-production process that constitutes the film as a finished product for exhibition. Table 1b collects the plot-story segmentations elaborated in Table 1a into four major sections: preopening, opening sequence, main story, and closing sequence. In each section, it provides the sub-total of takes, shots, and transitions as well as the average rate of transition per section. Finally Table 1b gives the total tally for the units analyzed.

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: Story-plot segmentations and narratives Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

00:00:00 1. Preopening (26 seconds)

a. Cinema City Logo (animated images) b. Film Workshop Logo (animated images)

00:00:26 2. Opening sequence a. Film title and credits roll superimposed over (87 seconds) a montage of opera props (weapons, headgears and beards) and four painted faces, one of which would appear again in the closing sequence (01:38:53) b. Theme song, It’s Showtime Again, which would be repeated in the closing credit sequence. 00:01:53 (174 seconds)

3. At the mansion; daytime

a. Warlord Tun enjoys a musical ensemble in the living room with his twenty-eight wives. Sheung Hung is one of the musicians. The Introducing main warlord finds her attractive and wishes to and supporting marry her. characters: b. Tun’s soldiers, unpaid and angry, gather (i) Sheung Hung, outside the mansion. They break into the a musician mansion and ransack it, fighting with each (00:01:53); other over the booty. Among them are Tung (ii) Warlord Tun Man and an officer with a “Dali” moustache (00:02:04); (hereafter simply known as “Dali’). (iii) Tung Man, c. The warlord and his wives flee. Upstairs, two Warlord of the wives fight over a box of jewelry. They Tun’s soldier lose grip of the box. It flies over the balus(00:02:44); and trade and drops to the lower floor. (iv) Officer with a d. The jewelry box falls near Tun Mun’s feet. He “Dali” moustache tries to retrieve it. Sheung Hung hits him on (00:03:44) the head with her moon-zither, knocking him unconscious. She runs off with the box.



Story and Structure 37

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

2

2

2

1 transition every 13 seconds.

18

18

18 cuts

1 transition every 4.83 seconds.

46

51

51 cuts

1 transition every 3.41 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios 00:04:47 (196 seconds)

Story-Plot Narratives

4. In the streets, a. Sheung Hung crawls through a hole in the near the mansion; mansion’s outer wall, carrying the box. She daytime. stops a cart-pusher and hitches a ride, paying him with a gold bangle. On the cart, she sees Introducing more a brown box. She quickly makes two parcels main and supporting of the jewelry using handkerchiefs, and puts characters, and their them into the box. main roles: b. There is a roadblock on the main street. (i) Ling Pak-Hoi, Some soldiers frisk the passersby, pocketing a revolutionary whatever valuable things they can find on rebel (00:06:26); them. (ii) Warlord Tsao c. The cart-pusher tries to flee. Warlord Tsao (00:06:48); and shoots him down. His body tumbles down the (iii) Tsao Wan, street and stops in front of Ling Pak-Hoi. Warlord Tsao’s d. Warlord Tsao is inside a vintage car. His daughter, also daughter, Tsao Wan, sits next to him. a revolutionary Warlord Tsao claims the mansion as his. rebel (00:06:56). e. The soldiers push Sheung Hung against the wall and start to search her. She tries to fend them off. Tsao Wan alights from the car and goes to her rescue. f. Someone pushes the cart away. Shueng Hung tries but fails to retrieve the brown box. She notices a sign on the cart: “Chun He Ban,” which turns out to be the name of an opera troupe.



Story and Structure 39

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

49

58

58 cuts

1 transition every 3.38 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

00:08:03 (448 seconds)

a. Outside the theater: Sheung Hung sees the Chun He Ban banners. She tries to enter the theater. The bouncers stop her as women are barred from the theater. They have an argument. Later, she scales a wall at the back of the theater and surveys its backyard. Harassed by an unnamed beggar (hereafter simply known as “Beggar’), she flees and hides inside the trunk of the aforementioned vintage car. b. Inside the auditorium: the patrons wait for the performance to start. Commander Lei walks in with his men, ordering them to search the theater for luandang (guerillas). Mr. Kam, the theater owner, rushes to meet Lei, offering a bribe. Ling Pak-Hoi is also at the theater. He makes contact with his ally, Manager Sung, recognizing him from the secret code, arranged with groundnuts, which the latter has placed on the lids of two teacups, on the table. Sung then introduces him to Tsao Wan. The three go to the toilet together. Fa Gum-Sao appears on stage. The patrons cheer. Lei settles down to watch the opera and becomes enthralled by Fa. c. In the backstage: Boss Wong goes about making preshow preparations frantically. Fa Gum-Sao comes up to him and complains about the wrinkles around his eyes. Wong ushers him on to the stage. His daughter, Pat Neil, tries to sneak on to the stage to perform. He stops her. Later while searching for luandang backstage, Lei’s men find her in a room. Regarding her as a guerilla suspect, they arrest her. Boss Wong pleads with Lei and secures her release with a bribe.

5. At a theater housed in Kwok Wo Building; daytime Introducing yet more main and supporting characters: (i) Boss Wong, Manager of Chun He Ban (00:08:24); (ii) Fa Gum-Sao, an opera diva (00:09:04) (iii) Pat Neil, Boss Wong’s daughter (00:09:35) (iv) Commander Lei, chief of secret police (00:10:27) (v) Mr. Kam, theater owner (00:10:33) (vi) Manager Sung, owner of Mingsheng Press (00:11:06); and (vii) An unnamed beggar (00:15:08)



Story and Structure 41

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

93

107

107 cuts

1 transition every 4.19 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives d. On stage: Fa Gum-Sao plays the titular concubine in the “Tyrant-king Bids Farewell to The Concubine” act, in which he performs a sword dance for the tyrant-king (bawang). The dance enthralls the viewers, including Lei, who becomes infatuated with him. e. Inside the toilet: Both Pak-Hoi and Tsao Wan suddenly pull out their guns and aim at each other. Manager Sung defuses the standoff. The three then settle down to discuss their revolutionary mission of gathering evidence that could indict President Yuan Shikai of an anti-Republic conspiracy. This entails stealing the foreign bank loan agreement which they anticipate Warlord Tsao would facilitate on behalf of the President. Finally, Tsao Wan leaves the theater and walks to a vintage car (in whose trunk Sheung Hung has hidden earlier).

00:15:31 (622 seconds)

6. At the mansion; nighttime

a. Tsao Wan drives the vintage car through the gate of the mansion and parks it in a garage. b. Near the garage are “Dali” and two fellow-soldiers. They push Tung Man against a wall, demanding that he gives them the box of jewelry. When they see the car, they plan to steal it. c. Tsao Wan goes upstairs in the mansion and spies on her father from the window balcony as he signs the loan agreement with some foreigners in a study. After the bankers leave, Warlord Tsao puts the document in a safe behind a portrait. He then goes to the adjacent room, where he hides the key inside a book.



Story and Structure 43

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

213

255

253 cuts

1 transition every 2.46 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives d. Outside the mansion wall, Ling Pak-Hoi tackles a patrolling guard and knocks him unconscious. He then disguises as Warlord Tsao’s soldier by wearing the guard’s uniform. e. Tsao Wan steals the key and opens the safe. Pak-Hoi suddenly appears in the study, closely followed by Sheung Hung. Pak-Hoi fires at Sheung Hung. The sound of gunshots summons Warlord Tsao back to the study. Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi abort the mission. f. Pak-Hoi fights off the warlord and his soldiers, and escapes to the garage. g. In the garage, “Dali” and his mates attack Pak-Hoi. Tung Man looks on. During the fight, Pak-Hoi kills his attackers, while Tung Man’s left shoulder suffers a gun wound. h. Tsao Wan arrives at the garage with Sheung Hung. They all leave the mansion together in her car.

00:25:53 7. In a street, near (36 seconds) the theater, nighttime

a. The car stalls near the theater. Tsao Wan and company disembark from the car and notice Commander Lei and his men patrolling the streets on foot nearby. Unseen by all is “Beggar” who hides in the shadows. b. Pak-Hoi knocks on a door which turns out to be the backdoor of the theater.

00:26:29 (251 seconds)

a. Pat Neil hears the raps and opens the door. Reluctantly, she lets Pak-Hoi and gang in. b. Pak-Hoi takes Tung Man into Pat Neil’s bedroom. Tsao Wan leaves the theater but soon returns with surgical instruments. Sheung Hung sees a cart in the backyard and recognizes it as the same one in which she left the box of jewelry earlier in the day. She starts to ransack it. Pat Neil stops her.

8. In the theater’s backyard, nighttime

1. sfx = computerized special effects.



Story and Structure 45

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate 1 spin sfx1 (00:18:16 to 00:18:17)

1 barn-door sfx (00:25:52 to 00:25:53) 9

14

14 cuts

1 transition every 2.57 seconds

59

77

77 cuts

1 transition every 3.26 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives c. Tsao Wan removes a bullet from Tung Man’s chest. After that, they leave the theater, except for Sheung Hung, who has sneaked off to look for the jewelry.

00:30:40 (128 seconds)

9. At the mansion; nighttime

00:32:48 10. Inside the (69 seconds) Minsheng Press; possibly daytime

00:33:57 (1,129 seconds)

a. Tsao Wan returns to the mansion. b. Warlord Tsao gives her a gun for self-protection. She is deeply moved by this act of fatherly love. He then meets up with his unnamed female companion (hereafter known as “Lover”). a. Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi try to work out a plan to steal the document again. The task has become more difficult since Warlord Tsao now carries the key on him everywhere he goes. Tung Man overhears the conversation, and suggests they set up a trap at the theater. Finally he agrees to help them.

11. Inside the theater; a. Backstage: Boss Wong gets ready for another from daytime to day of work. Sheung Hung searches for the nighttime box of jewelry backstage. To avoid detection she disguises herself as an opera performer, wearing the Mu Guiying outfit. Presently Commander Lei arrives bearing gifts for Fa Gum-Sao. He presses the diva to marry him. Fa refuses. Lei’s men torture him. Boss Wong intervenes by accepting the marriage proposal on Fa’s behalf. The commander then rushes outside to meet Warlord Tsao when told that the warlord has come to the theater for the opera. The performance begins some moments later. Much to his chagrin, Boss Wong discovers that Pat Neil is performing in the “Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom” act (in place of Fa).



Story and Structure 47

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

27

34

33 cuts

21

1 fade to black (00:32:47 to 00:32:49)

16

1 transition every 3.76 seconds

1 transition every 3.29 seconds

21 cuts

163

347

347 cuts

1 transition every 3.25 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives b. Inside a room on the upper level of the backstage: Fa mulls over his fate and decides to run away. Pat Neil helps him pack. She unwittingly packs the jewelry (which Sheung Hung has been looking for) into the parcel. As Fa crawls through a window to freedom, Pat Neil hands him the parcel and agrees to assume Fa’s role on stage. c. In the auditorium: Pak-Hoi and Tung Man arrive at the theater. Pak-Hoi sneaks upstairs, while Tung Man takes a seat downstairs. The secret police make their way through the auditorium noisily, carrying Lei’s gifts to Fa. Just before the opera begins, Warlord Tsao enters the theater with his daughter, lover and army in tow. They go upstairs to the balcony seats. d. In the balcony seats area: An attendant presents the warlord with cakes specially prepared by Tsao Wan, who has laced them with laxative. The opera begins. Warlord Tsao becomes enthralled with the two female characters, wishing they were women. “Lover” becomes jealous. She eats the laxative-laced cake. Commander Lei stands behind the warlord. While watching the opera, he notices that Fa is not performing on stage. He quietly orders his men to search for the diva. “Lover” rushes off to the toilet. Lei’s men return, whispering to the commander that they could not find Fa. Fearing something amiss, Tsao Wan goes to the toilet to look for “Lover.”



Story and Structure 49

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

50

TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives e. On stage: Pat Neil makes her acting debut as Mu Guiying, but is forced to improvise when Sheung Hung, presently disguised as Mu Guiying, accidentally falls onto the stage from a landing above. f. Inside the toilet: Ling Pak-Hoi hides in the ceiling, waiting to ambush Warlord Tsao. He is unaware that the plan has gone awry since it is Warlord Tsao’s lover, not the warlord himself, who has eaten the cakes. As she prepares to relieve herself, “Lover” catches a quick glimpse of Pak-Hoi behind the ceiling beams. She faints, thinking she has seen a ghost. Tsao Wan finds her unconscious inside the cubicle. She then asks the soldiers to take “Lover” back to the balcony area. g. Outside the toilet: As “Lover” regains consciousness, she mumbles hysterically about having seen a ghost. Commander Lei overhears her ramblings. Thinking that the ghost is in fact his missing Fa, he goes to the toilet. As he enters, Pak-Hoi hurls a bucket at him. h. The fight: It starts at the toilet area and soon spreads all over the theater. Lei and his men attempt to arrest Pak-Hoi and also Tun Man when he comes to his aid. Both escape with the help of Tsao Wan and Pat Neil. Lei orders the theater’s closure, as Boss Wong angrily chases Pat Neil around the stage with a stick. i. The second attempt to steal the key fails.

00:52:46 12. Outside the a. Tsao Wan consoles Pat Neil. The bouncers (95 seconds) theater; nighttime throw Sheung Hung out of the theater. The three women leave together. b. The song “Wanna Dodge but Can’t Hide” plays on the soundtrack. (00:53:22 to 00:54:01)



Story and Structure 51

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

16

18

18 cuts

Slow motion effect (00:53:22 to 00:53:07)

1 transition every 5.28 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

00:54:01 (142 seconds)

a. The three women enjoy a drunken revelry before the fireplace. b. Warlord Tsao tries to join them. They leave the mansion. The warlord becomes excited when told that Tsao Wan’s two friends are the performers he had seen at the theater.

13. At the mansion; nighttime

00:56:43 14. In the car; (17 seconds) nighttime

a. Tsao Wan drives her car, with Pat Neil and Sheung Hung as passengers. b. In a street, Ling Pak-Hoi and Tung Man stop the car and get in. They tell the girls that the secret police are keeping a watch over Minsheng Press, meaning they cannot go back to their hideout.

00:57:00 15. In Pat Neil’s (46 seconds) bedroom; nighttime

a. All except Tsao Wan spend the night in Pat Neil’s bed.

00:57:46 (463 seconds)

a. In the morning Warlord Tsao’s soldiers come to the theater and command Mr. Kam to put on an evening show for their boss, with Pat Neil and Sheung Hung as performers. Mr. Kam tells Boss Wong about the arrangement. Boss Wong goes to Pat Neil’s bedroom. b. Later that same day, Pat Neil gives Sheung Hung some quick lessons in opera performance, while Tsao Wan, Pak-Hoi and Tung Man concoct another plan to steal the key, this time using Sheung Hung as sex bait. Sheung Hung agrees to the fee. c. In the evening, Warlord Tsao watches Pat Neil and Sheung Hung perform the “Legend of Madam White Snake” act. d. After the performance he invites them for a nightcap.

16. At the theater, the next morning; daytime to nighttime.



Story and Structure 53

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

19

20

20 cuts

1 transition every 7.10 seconds

3

3

3 cuts

1 transition every 5.67 seconds

4

4

3 cuts

1 transition every 11.5 seconds

1 fade to black (00:57:43 to 00:57:46) 118

124

124 cuts

1 transition every 3.74 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

01:05:29 (222 seconds)

a. Pat Neil and Sheung Hung wait for Warlord Tsao in a room. b. Warlord Tsao flirts with the girls. Pat Neil hits him on the head, knocking him unconscious. Tsao Wan finds the key on her father. She opens the safe but the loan agreement is not in there. Sheung Hung finds it in the warlord’s pocket. She hands the envelope to Tsao Wan. The girls leave the mansion.

17. At the mansion; nighttime

01:09:11 18. In the car; (35 seconds) nighttime

a. Tsao Wan pays Sheung Hung. Pat Neil becomes upset when she realizes that she has unwittingly taken part in a conspiracy. Sheung Hung then demands more money, telling Tsao Wan that back in the mansion she had given her only one half of the document. Tsao Wan slams on the brakes.

01:09:46 (116 seconds)

a. Tsao Wan drags Sheung Hung out of the car, and pushes her against a wall. She threatens her with a gun. Pat Neil frisks Sheung Hung and finds the other half of the document on her. She gives it to Tsao Wan. Finally, she scolds them and walks away angrily. Tsao Wan runs after her. b. ”Beggar” attacks Sheung Hung, trying to rape her. Hearing her cries for help, Tsao Wan comes to her rescue. She kills “Beggar” and finds an identity card on him which exposes him as a secret agent working for Commander Lei. Tsao Wan decides to go home to her father and so leaves the loan agreement with Sheung Hung.

19. In the street; nighttime

01:11:42 20. At the theater; (77 seconds) nighttime

a. Pat Neil returns to a ransacked theater and finds out from Mr. Kam that Warlord Tsao has arrested her father and colleagues.



Story and Structure 55

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

52

72

72 cuts

1 transition every 3.08 seconds

7

8

8 cuts

1 transition every 4.4 seconds

28

39

39 cuts

1 transition every 2.97 seconds

24

1 defocus-type cross-dissolve (01:11:37 to 01:11:41)

18

1 transition every 3.21 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives b. Ling Pak-Hoi and Tung Man are also in the theater. At Mr. Kam’s urging, the three friends flee the theater.

01:12:59 (130 seconds)

21. In a street; nighttime

a. Outside the theater they run into Sheung Hung. She gives Pak-Hoi the secret document. b. The soldiers spot them and give chase. Pak-Hoi decides to tackle the soldiers alone and so passes the document to Tung Man who, together with the two girls, runs in the opposite direction. c. When the soldiers subsequently close in on the three, Tung Man gives the document to Sheung Hung. He deliberately draws the soldier’s attention to himself, thereby giving Hung and Neil the opportunity to escape.

01:15:09 22. At an unspecified (12 seconds) location; possibly nighttime

a. A secret police officer tells Commander Lei about Tsao Wan’s undercover identity as an agent for the Republicans.

01:15:21 (245 seconds)

a. Warlord Tsao prepares to flee town, and asks his daughter to join him. b. Tsao Wan secretly releases Pat Neil’s father and colleagues. c. Commander Lei arrives with his men to arrest her. Warlord Tsao tries to prevent the arrest and is shot dead by Lei. Tsao Wan shoots at the commander but misses. His men apprehend her.

23. At the mansion; nighttime

01:19:26 24. In a street; (37 seconds) daytime

a. Warlord Tun returns to town with his army. The townsfolk gather to watch the fanfare. b. The secret police arrest an overseas Chinese for commenting on political affairs.

01:20:03 (147 seconds)

a. Commander Lei tortures Tsao Wan, as Warlord Tun watches on. The latter suddenly desires her sexually, and so asks for her to be brought to the mansion. Finally, Commander Lei orders the execution of Pak-Hoi and Tung Man.

25. In the prison tower, next to the mansion; daytime



Story and Structure 57

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate 24 cuts

40

48

48 cuts

1 transition every 2.71 seconds

3

3

3 cuts

1 transition every 4 seconds

68

87

87 cuts

1 transition every 2.82 seconds

4

4

4 cuts

1 transition every 9.25 seconds

38

53

53 cuts

1 transition every 2.77 seconds

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

01:22:30 (354 seconds)

26. Inside the mansion; daytime

a. To rescue their friends, Sheung Hung and Pat Neil pay Warlord Tun a visit. b. In the study, Sheung Hung accidentally kills the warlord. The two girls then rescue Tsao Wan, who is tied spread-eagled to a bed in the adjacent bedroom. c. From the study balcony, Pat Neil swings on a rope to the prison tower which is adjacent to the mansion.

01:28:24 (136 seconds)

27. At the prison tower; early evening

a. Through a window, Pat Neil throws a gun into Ling Pak-Hoi and Tung Man’s cell. b. Some soldiers come into the cell and read out the execution order. Pak-Hoi shoots them dead. Pak-Hoi and Man then shoot their way out of the prison. c. Pat Neil meets them outside the prison tower and takes them to the garage. Waiting for them are Sheung Hung and Tsao Wan who then drives them to the theater.

01:30:40 (426 seconds)

28. At the theater; nighttime

a. After finding Tsao Wan’s car near the theater, Lei seals off the area and announces a curfew. He and his men go into the theater. b. Hiding inside the theater, the fugitives plan to escape via the rooftop, using the “Eight Deities Cross the Sea” act as a foil. c. Commander Lei dies during the rooftop chase.

01:37.46 29. At an unspecified (61 seconds) rural location somewhere in Peiping; daytime

a. A shot of the sun peeking through some dispersing clouds. b. The five friends briefly gather at a rocky place. Before dispersing, they promise to meet again.



Story and Structure 59

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

115

135

135 cuts

1 transition every 2.62 seconds

57

68

68 cuts

1 transition every 2 seconds

195

238

237 cuts

1 transition every 1.79 seconds

17

1 cross-dissolve (01:37:43 to 01:37:44)

16

17 cuts 1 freeze frame (01:38:35 to 01:38:48)

1 transition every 3.59 seconds

TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

60

Table 1a: (cont’d) Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

01:38:47 (124 seconds) DVD ends 01:40:51

a. Close credits; b. Theme Song; and c. A montage primarily composed of extracts from the main story, including the laughing painted face, first seen in the film’s opening, and some cuts-off that include takes of Pat Neil executing kungfu movements not seen in the main story

30. Closing sequence

Table 1b: Summary of the film’s story-plot segmentations Time Code Story-Plot Scenarios

Story-Plot Narratives

00:00:00 1 (26 seconds)

Pre-opening: production companies and logos

00:00:26 2 (87 seconds)

Opening sequence: film title, credits roll, opening montage, and theme song (It’s Showtime Again)

00::01:53 (5,814 seconds)

3 to 29

Main story, with the “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” song (00:53:22 to 00:54:01)

01:37:46 (124 seconds)

30

Closing sequence: credits roll, theme song, and a montage of selected images culled from the main story and opening sequence.

Total 6,051 seconds, or approximately 101 minutes

30



Story and Structure 61

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

57

57

2 freeze frames (01:38:53 to 01:38:56) and (01:40:30 to 01:40:31)

1 transition every 2.18 seconds

1 cross-dissolve (01:40:31 to 01:40:33) 56 cuts

No. of Takes

No. of Shots

No. of Transitions Average Rate

2

2

2

1 transition every 13 seconds.

18

18

18 cuts

1 transition every 4.83 seconds.

1,476

1,929

1923 cuts, 2 cross-dissolve, 2 fade to black, 1 spin sfx, 1 barn-door sfx, and 1 freeze frame

1 transition every 3.01 seconds

57

57

56 cuts, 2 freeze frames and 1 cross-dissolve

1 transition every 2.18 seconds

1,553

2,006

1,999 cuts, 8 non-cut 1 transition every type transitions, and 3.02 seconds 3 freeze frames

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

Narrative Economy As Table 1a shows, Peking Opera Blues both introduces and establishes, with narrative economy and efficiency, the film’s three major narrative sites (the mansion, the theater and the streets) and its fourteen narratively significant characters (both major and minor). There is also what looks like a vintage Rolls-Royce convertible which Tsao Wan would later drive around town (Scenarios 3–5). All this is done within the first fifteen minutes or so of the film. In story-plot constructions, the logic of narrative economy would generally hold sway because not all events, incidents, and situations need to be shown. It yields to the principle of intentional selection (what to show) and omission (what not to show). To give an example: viewers thus see Tsao Wan leave the theater in her car (at the end of Scenario 5), but not the journey that follows. The next scene shows her driving the car through the gate of a stately mansion (at the beginning of Scenario 6). The omission here—the journey between Tsao Wan leaving the theater in broad daylight and arriving at the mansion at night—is justified because that journey is not crucial to the film’s main story, which as it turns out, centers on the narration and dramatization of Tsao Wan’s attempt to steal a secret document in her father’s possession. Omissions such as this one help reduce narrative redundancy; it also compresses narrative time, thereby accelerating narrative pace. In the film, subplots are common. Whereas narrative omissions invite the viewers to “fill in the blanks” vis-à-vis the story’s presumed and inferred events, subplots supplement the plot. They enrich the primary story line, occasionally offering tantalizing narrative digression to the principal chain of events. Here, Scenario 9b is exemplary: it depicts Warlord Tsao giving Tsao Wan a gun for self-protection. The scenario emphasizes the theme of fatherly love that provides an inkling of Warlord Tsao’s complex psychology on the one hand, and on the other, creates suspense by highlighting



Story and Structure 63

the double-bind which Tsao Wan faces: to be a filial daughter or to be a patriotic revolutionary? Plots and subplots, including narrative omissions, offer a plethora of sensorial, affective, and imaginary experiences. Collectively, they articulate a film’s “representational space” which, to invoke Henri Lefebvre’s “production of space,” “has an affective kernel,” “embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations,” and “may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid, and dynamic.”5 The representational space is heterogeneous in character, running the gamut of absolute space, abstract space, contradictory space, segregated space, co-opted space, social space, natural space, leisure space, counter-space, and permutations or combinations thereof. It is here that units of narrative meaning emerge, which then develop in the diegesis, and finally dissipate or vanish. That is to say meaning is not “in the film,” but is formed by the interaction of the film’s representational space and narrative design with the viewer’s own horizon of perceptual, cognitive and social experience—the viewer’s interpretive practices and contributions. Accordingly, the resultant parasociality that cinema affords bears upon the ways the film may be interpreted and evaluated. This means that filmmakers cannot fully control the meaning of their films because the experiences, values, and assumptions that viewers bring to films, and which establish their bases of interpretation, are diverse and variable. This is not to say that viewers are oblivious to the “preferred readings” of particular films (they are not), but rather says that they can negotiate with them, even generating oppositional meanings, based on their personal and social experience,6 so much so that: 5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 42. 6. Stuart Hall (1980), “Encoding/decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 128–38.

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TSUI HARK’s PEKING OPERA BLUES

In social encounters, in movies as in real life, people define their relationships to others by sending clear signals, meaningful displays of posture, position, gesture, physical touch, eye contact, and vocal inflection. These signals express emotion and help define relationships as already existing, as potential, personal, intimate, impersonal, hostile, etc. These signals vary by culture, but all members of a society learn how to read the expressions and gestures coming from other people as a way of inferring what they are thinking or feeling. The camera captures and records this kind of information . . . on screen.7

Because so many movies establish screen worlds that are recognizably similar to their own—literally, symbolically or metaphorically— viewers tend to evaluate the narrative’s portrayals of particular social issues, situations, or groups in terms of their own understanding. As a result, film texts are always polysemic and polyvocal—a point I emphasize throughout this book with its strategic use of multiple readings of Peking Opera Blues.

High-Speed Editing and the Illusion of Continuous Narrative While the deployment of narrative economy is his forte, Tsui has a reputation of overshooting. “He treats film like videotape,” observes cinematographer Marco Mak, adding that he would typically shoot with “three, even four cameras,” using “up to 300,000 feet” of celluloid (when the standard is 80,000 to 100,000 feet per movie).8 For a 100-minute film like Peking Opera Blues, that 7. Stephen Prince, Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 12. 8. Marco Mak, “No Tsui Hark, No Pleasure: Editor Marco Mak Sticks to His Old Master,” trans. Piera Chan, in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 142–43.



Story and Structure 65

amount of footage would translate into a shooting ratio of approximately 33:1.9 If this was the case for Peking Opera Blues (which is not improbable), then it would mean that Tsui shot thirty-three times the amount of footage than was used in the film. This also means Tsui would have had an (over)abundance of filmed material to work with during the postproduction process. The abundance accounts for Tsui’s signature style of high-speed editing and rapid crosscutting between and across scenes. As James Wong, a longtime collaborator of Tsui’s who also composed the music for Peking Opera Blues, has put it: Tsui “wants everything at breakneck speed,” including the soundtrack, with the “rhythm of a machine gun . . . He loves speed.”10 And yes, he does love speed. In the film’s first fifteen minutes alone, Peking Opera Blues utilizes at least 188 takes—that is, one take every five or so seconds, on average—representing about 87 percent of the shots used thus far (Scenarios 3–5). In terms of transitions, those fifteen minutes or so manifest no fewer than 216 cuts, or approximately one shot-transition every four seconds. The average shot-transition for the whole film (Scenarios 3 onwards) is higher though, with one transition every three or so seconds: as Table 1b shows, the film (not counting the two cuts in the preopening sequence which flashes Cinema City and Film Workshop logos) runs for about 6,025 seconds, during which period it has approximately 2,004 transitions—1997 cuts, 3 cross-dissolves, 2 fades out to black, and 2 special effects wipes—or about one transition every three seconds.

9. This ratio is calculated with “Film Footage, Frame and Running Time Calculator,” http://www.scenesavers.com/content/show/film-footage-calculator (accessed May 1, 2015). 10. James Wong, “I Love Him and I Hate Him: James Wong on Composing for a Truly Creative Mind,” trans. Margaret Lee, in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 126.

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High-speed editing in a single location But the average shot-transition can be even higher, as in the case, for example, of the fight sequence in a garage (Scenario 6g) that shows astonishingly high-speed editing—see my shot-by-shot analysis in Tables 2a and 2b. The fight sequence has a total of thirty-three takes and cuts. It runs for thirty seconds in total, which means that on average there is about a cut every second. In some cases, the average number of shot changes per second is two (Shots 1C and 1D, 3A and 3B, and 3D and 4A), three (Shots 4C, 4D and 5A), or higher (Shots 5B, 5C, 5D, and 6A). The thirty-three takes display a diversity of shot compositions (long, medium, close-up, and rack focus shots), as well as camera emplacements (establishing and point-of-view shots), angles (leveled and low-angled), movements (primarily static, possibly one tilt-pan), and quick cuts. They collectively yield a temporally linear sequence, but one disrupted by spatial discontinuity since the background of each take changes either physically or in terms of perspective. The illusion of a continuous narrative is nevertheless sustained throughout the fight sequence. This is primarily achieved via the use of editing techniques such as eye-line match and match-in-action, as well as sounds that serve as segues between shots. Such sounds produce aural excitement. They range from diegetic shrieks, grunts, and puffs, including the noisy impact of combat, to non-diegetic music such as the occasional sounds from an electronic synthesizer for creating particular moods. The fight sequence ends with suspense. Shadows that loom menacingly (Shot 9C), foreshadowing the actual appearance of monstrous figures, are a narrative convention of horror movies. Tsui Hark gives this a generic twist when the shadows turn out to be Tsao Wan’s and Sheung Hung’s—much to Pak-Hoi’s relief, of course. The sequence also ends with a cliffhanger of sorts. Can Pak-Hoi escape now that the car has a punctured tank with petrol



Story and Structure 67

Table 2a: Narration and editing at a single location: the fight at the garage sequence (Scenario 6g) A 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

B

C

D

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Table 2b: The fight at the garage sequence: camera composition, movement, and shot type (Scenario 6g). Shot 1A (00:24:29)

Take 1 (establishing shot; rack shot): Ling Pak-Hoi senses danger behind him. He turns around.

Shot 1B (00:24:32)

Take 2 (across the 180-dgree axis): He sees three attackers (offscreen).

Shot 1C (00:24:34)

Take 3 (shot/reverse shot): “Dali” glares at Pak-Hoi, and gives the order to attack.

Shot 1D (00:24:34)

Take 4: Soldier 1 makes a move at Pak-Hoi, holding a knife in his hand.

Shot 2A (00:24:35)

Take 5: Pak-Hoi throws a punch at Soldier 1 which sends him flying into the air. In the far background is Tung Man.

Shot 2B (00:24:36)

Take 6: Soldier 1 crashes against a wall.

Shot 2C (00:24:37)

Take 7: Pak-Hoi throws Soldier 2 over his shoulders, who comes crashing down on the floor. Then he makes a quick dash for “Dali.”

Shot 2D (00:24:38)

Take 8: Pak-Hoi grabs “Dali” by the clothes and aims a punch at him.

Shot 3A (00:24:39)

Take 9 (close-up): Pak-hoi punches “Dali” on the stomach.

Shot 3B (00:24:39)

Take 10: Pak-Hoi throws another punch at “Dali,” this time at his head. The blow sends him flying off-screen.

Shot 3C (00:24:40)

Take 11: Soldier 1 attacks Pak-Hoi from behind with a flying kick.

Shot 3D (00:24:41)

Take 12: The kick hurls Pak-Hoi towards and over the vintage car.

Shot 4A (00:24:41)

Take 13: Pak-Hoi glides over the car.

Shot 4B (00:24:42)

Take 14: The steering wheel breaks Pak-Hoi’s fall.

Shot 4C (00:24:43)

Take 15: Soldier 1 leaps into the air.

Shot 4D (00:24:43)

Take 16: Pak-Hoi lifts himself from the steering wheel.

Shot 5A (00:24:43)

Take 17: Pak-Hoi blocks off Soldier 1’s attack.



Story and Structure 69 Shot 5B (00:24:44)

Take 18: Pak-Hoi throws Soldier 1 over his shoulders.

Shot 5C (00:24:44)

Take 19: The two fall off the car together.

Shot 5D (00:24:44)

Take 20: Finding his footing, Pak-Hoi flips Soldier 1 to the ground.

Shot 6A (00:24:44)

Take 21: Pak-Hoi slits Soldier 1 with a knife, while Soldier 2 prepares to attack him.

Shot 6B (00:24:46)

Take 22: Tung Man shrieks.

Shot 6C (00:24:47)

Take 23: Soldier 2 leaps at Pak-Hoi, who stabs him with the knife.

Shot 6D (00:24:48)

Take 24: “Dali” grunts and reaches for his gun.

Shot 7A (00:24:50)

Take 25: Pak-Hoi notices “Dali.” He looks worried and contemplates his next move.

Shots 7B, 7C (00:24:51)

Take 26: “Dali” aims his gun at Pak-Hoi. Tung Man tries to intercept. This allows Pak-Hoi time to prepare for his defense. “Dali” turns around and shoots at him. The bullet hits Tung Man in the shoulder area.

Shot 7D (00:24:52)

Take 27: Tung Man falls against a wall.

Shot 8A (00:24:52)

Take 28: Pak-Hoi throws the knife at “Dali.”

Shot 8B (00:24:53)

Take 29: The knife glides through the air and pierces “Dali.”

Shot 8C (00:24:54)

Take 30: “Dali” falls backwards and pulls the gun trigger reflexively.

Shot 8D (00:24:54)

Take 31: The bullet hits the car’s petrol tank. Petrol gushes out.

Shot 9A (00:24:55)

Take 32: “Dali” collapses to the ground, dead.

Shots 9B, 9C (00:24:56 to (00:24:59)

Take 33: Pak-Hoi gets up. Then he notices two shadows on the far wall. He quickly hides behind the car, getting ready to toss the knife.

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spilling from it (Shot 8D)? How far can he go? This notwithstanding, the scene encapsulates an ironic form of narrative motivation that foreshadows their first, albeit unplanned, meeting with Pat Neil: upon leaving the garage, the car, as expected, runs out of petrol, but quite coincidentally stalls in the backstreet of the theater where she happens to live and work (Scenarios 7 and 8). Crosscutting in a single location involving multiple sites Like the fast-editing of the audiovisual track that comprises ever-changing action, performance, color, and sounds, crosscutting keeps temporally concurrent but spatially distinct narrative threads fresh and lively. It helps quicken the pace and rhythm of the story line, capturing viewers’ attention with its plot twists, visual surprises and narrative jumps. It manifests in Scenarios 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, and 28, accounting for approximately 2,955 seconds, or just about 52 percent, of the screen story’s total duration. The most extended use of crosscutting is in Scenario 11, which takes up about 1,129 seconds of the total story-time. Here, the multiple chains of narrative events split between and are interspersed in five sites inside the theater at Kwok Wo Building: the balcony seats (upstairs), the toilet area (upstairs), the viewing areas (downstairs), the backstage (downstairs), and the stage zones (downstairs). Tables 3a and 3b below offer a shot-by-shot analysis of one crosscutting montage in this scenario. The sequence comprises thirteen takes and thirteen cuts, and runs for about fourteen seconds. The shot-transitions and edit-transitions occur simultaneously, at the average rate of one transition every one second or so. Shots 11A, 11C, 11D, and 12A of Tables 3a and 3b resemble cutaway shots, but they are not. Instead they belong and so are integral, to the narrative threads, or scenarios that suture three interweaving subplots at the theater: Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi’s second



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Table 3a: Narration and crosscutting across multiple sites in a single location: the chaos in the theater sequence (Scenario 11h) A

B

C

D

10

11

12

13

Table 3b: The chaos in the theater sequence: camera composition, movement, and shot types Shot 10A (00:47:34)

Take 1: Ling Pak-Hoi is trapped inside the toilet.

Shot 10B (00:47:35)

Take 2: Outside, Commander Lei lifts the red curtain to the toilet, watched by Tsao Wan (behind Lei’s left shoulder) and others.

Shot 10C (00:47:36)

Take 3: Inside the toilet, Pak-Hoi tosses a bucket (at Lei).

Shot 10D (00:47:37)

Take 4 (establishing shot): Outside the toilet, the crowd ducks as the bucket comes flying at them.

Shot 11A (00:47:38

Take 5: At the balcony viewing area, Warlord Tsao reacts to the commotion.

Shot 11B (00:47:39)

Take 6 (low-angle shot): Outside the toilet, some people fall down a stairwell.

Shot 11C (00:47:41)

Take 7 (high-angle shot): In the downstairs viewing area, Tung Man and others react to the commotion.

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Shot 11D (00:47:42)

Take 8: On-stage, Pat Neil (as Mu Guiying) reacts to the commotion. The performance stops.

Shot 12A (00:47:44)

Take 9: Backstage, Mr. Jin, Boss Wong, Sheung Hung and others react to the commotion in the auditorium. The first two are in the foreground plane (middle and left, respectively), while Sheung Hung, dressed as Mu Guiying, is in the far background.

Shot 12B (00:47:45)

Take 10 (low-angle shot): Upstairs, a group of people crash through a railing and fall off the landing.

Shot 12C (00:47:46)

Take 11 (low-angle shot): From the upstairs landing, the group falls to the ground.

Shot 12D (00:47:48)

Take 12: Downstairs, Tsao Wan is among the people who have fallen from the upper landing. Someone shouts out, “Protect Warlord Tsao!”

Shot 13A (00:47:48)

Take 13 (low-angle shot): Upstairs, a group of soldiers protects the warlord.

attempt to steal the key Warlord Tsao now carries in his pocket (Shot 11A), with the help of Tun Man, who unlike the warlord is seated in the auditorium below (Shot 11C); Pat Neil’s performance on stage (Shot 11D); and backstage frenzies (Shot 12A). They are composed as reaction shots to the mayhem that ensues from the fight which suddenly begins in the toilet area upstairs (Shots 10A to 10D). As the combatants tumble down the stairs or crash through the railings to the auditorium below (Shots 12B to 12D), soldiers quickly form a protective shield around the warlord (Shot 13A). The fight abruptly stops the opera performance in its track (Shot 11D); it also causes the characters in the backstage to reel in shock at the unexpected turn of events (Shot 12A). Finally, the crosscutting sequence here, as with others elsewhere in the film, depict temporally simultaneous or sequential events (and permutations thereof), while the use of sounds (both diegetic and non-diegetic), editing conventions (such as match-in-action and eye-line match),



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and shooting techniques (such as low-and high-angle takes) that articulate physical proximity, matching perspectives, and correspondent point-of-views, help smooth over narrative discontinuities that come with spatial jumps. The frequent use of quick cuts and the high occurrence of crosscutting as a narrative device give Peking Opera Blues an exhilarating energetic burst that may seem chaotic to the untrained eye. However, it is more fruitful to think of Tsui Hark’s signature fast-editing and crosscutting style as a form of “organized chaos,”11 as generative of aural excitement, visual vigor, and narrative energy that comes with Tsui’s penchant for “powerful movements of the camera” that both “intensify the actors’ movements” and convey “the intensity and power of . . . images.”12 Rather than unrestrained chaos, the fight montage at the garage and in the theater reveal order in disorderliness and coherence in incoherency, with rapid cuts and crosscuts pulling and holding together the narration of quick moving actions and responses in temporally sequential but spatially discontinuous environments.

“Organized Chaos” and Cluttered Mise en Scène Engendering narrative force and visual vigor, the dynamic energies of organized chaos can be further glimpsed in the cluttered mise en scène of particular shot compositions. Like fast cutting and crosscutting, cluttered mise en scène is also Tsui’s trademark. In Peking Opera Blues, the two shots in Table 4 are exemplary: 11. Cindy S. C. Chan, “Organised Chaos: Tsui Hark and the System of the Hong Kong Film Industry,” in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 52–56. 12. Arthur Wong, “Worse than Hitler: Cinematographer Arthur Wong Remem­ bers,” trans. Piera Chan, in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 133.

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Table 4: The marriage proposal (Scenario 11a)

Shot 14A: 00:37:05

Shot 14B: 00:37:39

Not linked back to back, they constitute crucial aspects of the scenario in which Commander Lei makes Fa Gum-Sao a marriage offer. Whether Fa is willing or unwilling, the commander is adamant about taking the cross-sex opera performer as his xianggong. Xianggong is opera parlance for a male lover or husband. It is also a colloquial euphemism for young and handsome actors who are sexually available as catamites. Fa is a middle-aged actor, but in the eyes of the commander, he is a “meinü” (pretty lady.)13 The twist is given a further turn when the rouged actors who initially gather around Fa, animatedly propping him up and expressing sympathy for his plight, all immediately abandon him the moment he makes the suggestion to Lei that he considers them instead. The hilarity of these noisy and fickle “human props” stands in stark contrast 13. Commander Lei is comparable to a laodou. Laodou are rich and powerful patrons of the theater who seek the company of boy “actresses” as drinking and sexual companions after the performance. They include successful officials, wealthy merchants, and sons of powerful nobles. They are not necessarily elderly: the “old” in the appellation carries honorific (if laced with sarcasm) denotation. They may “marry” their beloved boy actress; in which case they would typically negotiate the terms of release with the theater owner since the latter would have trained, fed and lodged the boy actress from an early age. See Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 17–22, 53–58.



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to the quiet but assertive presence of the stately opera costumes (background) and props (foreground) that are cluttered around the commander, whose calm voice and composed posture in turn is a measured contrast to Fa’s distress. The array of contrastive arrangements within the one shot or between the two shots combines hilarity and distress, fickleness and stateliness, authoritarianism and powerlessness. These visual pokes, together with the assorted colors, from the somber black to the spectacular red, are as characteristic as the film’s cluttered mise en scène. In terms of screen duration, Shots 14A and 14B run for two and four seconds long respectively.14 Occasionally, Tsui Hark holds a shot for a relatively more extended period. Such occurrences are rare, however. In Table 5 below, Shot 15B is a good example. It runs for twenty-nine seconds. In terms of screen duration, it is probably the longest single narrative unit in the film. The following mise en scène analysis of Shot 15B, in conjunction with Shot 15A, shows how the film sustains narrative energy in relatively longer narrative units. Table 5: The father and daughter conversation (Scenario 23a)

Shot 15A ( 01:15:21 to 01:15:25)

Shot 15B (01:15:45 to 01:16:14)

14. The particular take of Fa Gum-Sao is used twice in the film. Here I refer to the second edited shot which is about six seconds shorter than the first one (00:36:52 to 00:37:00). Unlike the former which occurs three seconds later, or after a shot reverse shot that shows Liu looking at Fa lustfully, the latter has a line of dialogue.

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Shot 15A is static and has a cluttered mise en scène like Shots 14A and 14B (see also Shots 10D and 12A for instance). The asymmetrical arrangement of the three candle stands gives the shot a skewed composition. Uneven illumination following from the different placement of the three stands adds visual disorderliness, while the messy tabletop accentuates this sense of clutter. Though relatively less cluttered than Shot 15A in terms of composition, Shot 15B similarly retains the visual contrast between the regal posture of Warlord Tsao in splendid military regalia in the portrait (which now connotes former glory) and the warlord’s presently disheveled state, which in turn stands in glaring disparity to his daughter’s smart dark-colored Sun Yat-sen suit, also known as the Zhongshan suit. The tighter framing in Shot 15B offers a closer look at the dishevelment; and the warlord’s dress reinforces this, especially his white shirt, which is undone at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves, with the lower hem pulled over the trousers. Warlord Tsao’s sartorial coding is evocative of the narrative convention for “step-down” high-ranking officials such as a general in Peking opera, who would typically be disrobed. Their regal attire (such as that seen in the background of Shot 14B) would be stripped off, leaving them in their underclothes (which are invariably white in color). The stripping, signaling the loss of power and prestige, includes the removal of the headgear as well. This is precisely the situation for Warlord Tsao after he loses the precious loan agreement. Shot 15B uses a mobile camera. While keeping Warlord Tsao and his daughter within the frame, it periodically tracks in and out, or pans left and right, but always in an almost imperceptible manner. The father moves about restlessly and angrily, occasionally picking up objects and throwing them, while the daughter tries to reason with him, as follows:



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Daughter: That15 would be a dangerous thing to do. If your subordinates find out about your loss of control, they will mutiny. [Father picks up a pile of paper.] Why don’t we flee in disguise instead? [Father throws the pile down.] This would be safer. Father: Safer? If I fear danger, I would not be a military man. I have fought with my life over the years [Shot 11B] [Father raises a fist at Daughter]. Whoever dares to touch me, I will hit back. [Father pushes Daughter out of his way.] Daughter: Papa, don’t just care for yourself. [Father picks up something and tosses it away.] Think about the big picture. [Father picks up a book and turns the pages violently.] Father: The big picture? [Father chucks down the book.] Without me, don’t talk about the big picture. The big picture is just pretty talk. In actuality people are selfish: they care only for themselves. [Father picks up a piece of paper and flings it away.] The more powerful they become the more influence they wield.

The performance here captures and intensifies conflicts of various kinds. An agitated male voice is pitted against a reasoned, female voice. The performativity and narrativity of visually contrasting elements through sartorial and color codes, including the portrait (contextually denoting nobleness but now also connoting former glory), adds to the drama of contention.

15. Warlord Tsao intends to flee, and “that” refers to his plan to take his army with him.

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Cross-Dissolves, Fades, and Wipes As mentioned previously, cuts—an editing device—predominate throughout the film, whereas the use of non-cut type transitions is rare and occasional. Unlike cuts, which are swift and immediate, the non-cut types such as cross-dissolves, fades, and wipes are less so; as such, they can offer room, however momentarily, for reflection and introspection, even comedy. The two computer-generated special effect wipes—a spin and a barn-door—grace Scenario 6. They each run for about one second long, and have a comedic edge akin to cartoon and comics. The spin-wipe displays narrative economy. On the “A-side,” Pak-Hoi wipes out an unnamed foot patrol with a dot-like moustache by knocking him unconscious, whereupon the two immediately disappear from the visual field. Pak-Hoi suddenly reemerges in the “B-side” (or flip-side), this time wearing the latter’s uniform and smiling smugly. Disguised as Warlord Tsao’s soldier, he thus gains entry to the warlord’s mansion. The barndoor wipe mirrors the movement of a gate, almost like a visual gag, which swings open as Tsao Wan drives her yellow car through it. Comic- or cartoon-like motifs and visuals are recurrent—perhaps better exemplified, not so much in the scene where the spreadeagled Tsao Wan is thrashed to the bone, with a whip, in the interrogation cell, but rather more in the subsequent scenes that show her moving about agilely and vigorously (Scenarios 26c onwards). Her speedy recovery from the brutal thrashing calls to mind moments in comics and cartoons where characters recuperate from a bomb exploding in their face without fatality, or simply get up and then saunter off after falling from a high cliff, or after being run over by a truck. As with the two wipes, the three cross-dissolves mark various spatial and temporal transitions. The first (about four seconds long) conveys temporally simultaneous events that occur in two theaters (Scenarios 20a). The defocus shot technique facilitates the



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narrative transition. In the dark alley are Tsao Wan and Sheung Hung. They find an identity card on the beggar killed by Tsao Wan a moment ago, while rescuing Sheung Hung.16 The card reveals his identity as a secret agent working for Commander Lei. Tsao Wan now anticipates and fears imminent arrest (which occurs elsewhere soon after). This scene suddenly moves out of focus. Working in tandem with the last, the next scene immediately begins with an out-of-focus shot which then moves to clear focus as Pat Neil walks into the archway of the theater’s backdoor. She looks anxious at first. When she walks through the backdoor and catches sight of a ransacked theater, she dreads the worst—that Warlord Tsao’s army has arrested her father and colleagues (which turns out to be the case). The electronically synthesized notation in the soundtrack, together with the defocus shot, thus amplifies suspense, danger, and fear. Unlike the first, the second cross-dissolve (about one second long) which is manifested at the spatial-temporal cusp between Scenarios 28c and 29a enacts hope: the shot of a memorial archway at night (where Commander Lei dies) giving way to that of the sun peeking through dispersing clouds alludes to a new beginning. The third cross-dissolve (about two seconds long) “conspires” with the film’s closing credits montage (Scenario 30), which, in reciting highlights from the film’s main story, helps fold the plot back to the story. This re-looping of the film’s beginning to its ending grants the film a circular narrative structure—a point to which I shall return later. The film has two fade-to-black edits. The first, about three seconds long, occurs at the end of Scenario 9b, that is, soon after Tsao Wan sees her father off at the door of the study. Earlier in the study, General Tsao had given one of his cherished possessions, a 16. The beggar is an unnamed character who hangs out around the theater. Here this mysterious figure makes his third appearance in the film. Prior to this, he is seen sexually harassing Sheung Hung in broad daylight behind the theater (Scenario 5a), and then again, also at the theater but this time, hiding in the shadows as if keeping a night watch on the theater (Scenario 7a).

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gun, to Tsao Wan for self-protection. This gesture of fatherly care and love moved the daughter deeply. Presently standing at the doorway, she holds the gift contemplatively. This shot emphasizes Tsao Wan’s moral dilemma: to stand with her father, or to uphold her political belief as a patriotic revolutionary? Choosing the latter would mean betraying her father’s love and trust. Representing emotional uncertainty, then, the blackout that follows also alludes to conflicted loyalty that lurks in the dark depths of the daughter’s heart. By contrast, the second fade-to-black (about three seconds long) is a teaser of sorts. It is seen in the bedroom scene where Pat Neil and her three friends, Sheung Hung, Pak-Hoi, and Tung Man, have all crawled under the thick blanket on her bed (at the end of Scenario 15). It literally blacks out the details of what happens in that bed, under that cover, on that night. Like the first blackout, the second one also encourages speculation but gives no answer. This keeps viewers curious and in suspense. In the morning-after scene, Pak-Hoi and Pat Neil, upon waking up, blush beetroot when looking at each other. Why do they blush? Did they, or for that matter Sheung Hung and Tung Man, not simply fall asleep and spend an innocent night together in the same bed under the dark cover of the night? Did something else happen? Whatever the speculation, the answer—as in the case of the first fade-out to black—is similarly left to the imagination.

Metastructure Finally, the film has three freeze frames. As the horses carrying the five friends kick up clouds of dust, galloping furiously, as it were, in the directions of all corners of China, the aerial shot of the riders suddenly freezes the frenziedly paced film to a spot (Scenario 29b). This is the film’s first freeze frame; the other two are found in the film’s closing montage (Scenario 30). The first freeze shot is about



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fourteen seconds long. Over this freeze shot the soundtrack plays the theme song, which gradually replaces the sounds of the galloping hooves. The subsequent decolorization in the freeze shot blends the multiple hues of the friends’ political aspirations and personal dreams (discussed above) into a black and white photograph-like image. This monochromatized freeze shot conveys frozen time— both historical and fictional—while simultaneously conjuring up a metastructure for locating, vicariously or otherwise, China’s past, present and future in relation to that immobilized historical-fictional time. In this metastructure, history becomes fiction, and fiction becomes history. As such this particular metastructure becomes a symbolic channel for importing historical hindsight and the benefits that come with such knowledge into the movie, generating off-screen conversations. A sudden spill of guttural laughter—“Ha! Ha! Ha!”—punctuates the theme song and roars over the freeze shot. Functioning as an instance of segueing, the roaring bellows prompt the appearance of the diegetic source: a painted face associated with the battalion-general role-type in Peking opera (Table 6: Shot 16). Displaying the film’s characteristic cluttered mise en scène shot that radiates intense visual energy, the take shows the painted face moving towards the camera, as it laughs with robust theatricality. Three Table 6: The bellowing painted face (Scenarios 2a and 30c)

Shot 16 (00:01:52 and 01:38:35)

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seconds later, the film suddenly freezes the shot; whereupon the bellow dissipates into the theme song as if it were a medley. The freeze shot prompts the credits to roll, which, as mentioned above, are superimposed over a montage composed with not only selected shots culled from the main story but also previously unseen shots of Pat Neil executing some impressive kungfu movements. This reappearance of the same ferocious-looking general, first seen bellowing in the final shot of the film’s opening credits sequence (00:01:52), marks a narrative repetition. There are three other forms of repetitions here: the theme song, the credits, and the montage, which together with the motif of the painted face and his bellowing function like the two handles of an accordion that holds up the film’s main story (that runs between Scenarios 3 and 29). This sort of repetition is part of the narrative role of folding the plot back to the story and structurally brings Peking Opera Blues around full circle. The re-looping of the film’s ending to its opening (traditionally known in rhetorical analysis as an “inclusio”) brackets off the story (diegesis). The accordion-like handles’ “double-coding”17 in the film’s opening and ending, as simultaneously attached and detached to the film’s main story, acts finally as a loop which allows, in a manner of speech, the sandwiched main story to be played again and again, inscribes and subverts prevailing conventions as to what constitutes the beginning, the ending, and the story itself.

Metafiction Does the re-looping keep the story in a perpetual cycle of telling and retelling? Where does the film open and end? Does this mean that the film offers a choice of endings, or for that matter, 17. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 117.



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openings? Or does it signal the impossibility of opening/ending? Who or what determines where is the beginning or the ending? Whatever the answers, these questions invite self-reflexivity, and as such this self-reflexivity renders Peking Opera Blues as a form of metafiction.18 It is a metafiction because the film plays with the syncretism of historical and fictional illusions and the laying bare of those illusions. Further, it plays with the imaginary construction of narrative visions, while making statements that hollow out the visions. In breaking down distinctions between history and fiction, the metafiction merges them into the concepts of interpretations and deconstructions, engendering extratextual associations that connect them to the temporal metastructure of historical hindsight. It accordingly displays postmodernist “incredulity towards metanarratives” marked by totalizing impetuses that endorse purportedly universal and eternal truths as if natural and normal, “insist[ing] upon the plurality of ‘power-discourse’ formations (Foucault), or of ‘language games’ (Lyotard)” instead.19 The bellowing, at the same time, is akin to a voice-over except that it uncharacteristically stays outside the diegetic space of the film’s main story. Like the voiceover as a narrative device that conveys omniscience, the bellowing, backed by historical hindsight, has an ironic power of enunciation and commentary. It is little surprise, then, that the return of the painted face, bellowing with laughter, at the end of Peking Opera Blues has a (self-)mocking quality that among other things undercuts the revolutionary optimism which Tsao Wan and her fellow revolutionary, Pak-Hoi, both embody and personify. Divorced from the narrative of time and space in the main story and decontextualized from the actual practices of Peking opera, the painted face, like 18. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 6. 19. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 45.

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his bellowing, is therefore a “disembodied’20 entity. Staring out of the screen at the audience, the face addresses the audience directly, generating off-screen conversations that relate to on-screen narratives, while encouraging a self-reflexive rethinking of the status quo, the everyday, the historical, the fictional, and—to use Tsao Wan’s words—the “big picture.” In the next chapter, I will turn to this “big picture,” beginning by reading the film through the lens of some historical background in relation to the Chinese democratic dream, and most particularly to the role of hero, embodied for the most part, though not with direct reference in the film, by the looming figure of Sun Yat-sen.

20. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 168.

Act 2

Warlords, History, and the Democratic Dream

The Chinese Republic As Commander Lei falls to his death from the rooftop on a wintry night towards the end of Peking Opera Blues, he lands on a memorial archway before crashing to the icy ground (Scenario 28c). On the archway are four characters, putian tongqing. Each character is written on a red diamond-shaped board and then arranged in the form of a henglian, or horizontal banner. The characters collectively mean: “Let the world celebrate together, in jubilation.” This four-character slogan refers to a celebratory occasion of national significance, though what the occasion is is never made explicit. Nor is it clear who raised the banner, or why it is hoisted at all. It just happens to be there. Does the banner allude to the birth of the Chinese Republic on January 1, 1912, which heralded the end of thousands of years of monarchist rule in China, and its remembrance in the winter of 1913, which as mentioned before is the time of the film’s narrative setting, thus signaling a commemoration of the Republic’s second anniversary? Whatever the case, the banner

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would serve as an ironic epitaph for the commander, whose blood smears the banner as his bullet-ridden body rolls off the archway to the ground below. It is ironic because the death of a villain is hardly a cause for national celebration—unlike, say, the founding of the Chinese Republic. Yet celebrating the particular death as a national event is not at all inappropriate, if viewed in the context of the turbulent times in modern Chinese history, or more specifically, in the tempestuous Chinese Republican period (circa 1913). This is because Commander Lei had worked for the despotic Yuan Shikai (1859–1916). Though a historical stalwart of his time, Yuan, as the first inaugurated president of the Chinese Republic, has largely been remembered negatively as a monarchy revivalist who thwarted the Republican’s much cherished dream of founding a democratic China based on what is now known as the “Three Principles of the People” (sanmin zhuyi). It is thought that the germinal idea for sanmin zhuyi was first mooted by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), who was to become revered as the founding father of the Chinese Republic, as early as 1895, if not before.1 The three principles are: democracy, or people’s power (minquan zhuyi); livelihood (minsheng zhuyi); and nationalism (minzu zhuyi). The first takes monarchical constitutionalism as its antithesis and promotes republican constitutionalism based on electoral democracy. The second pertains to a general concern for the personal, social, and economic well-being of the people. The last combines “nation”—construed in the terms of a geography of ethnicities—and “state,” understood as a bureaucratic and political entity. Its aim is to unify Chinese people under the rubric of the Chinese nation regardless of their ethnic origin. In practice, and as it turned out, its particular emphasis on national unity and ethnic solidarity, favored the Han Chinese, who formed the vast majority of 1. Key Ray Chong, Sun Yat-sen and the West: Western Influence and His Life and Thought (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 166.



warlords, history, and the democratic dream 87

China. In any case, the three principles together offered a roadmap for building and strengthening a country rendered weak and impoverished by authoritarian governance and foreign domination.2 The vision represented a radical break with nearly two thousand years of imperial rule. President Yuan resorted to restoring a monarchy with himself as a new emperor of China instead. Themes about revolutionary fervor, democratic reforms, monarchist revivalism, and such are central to the plot of Peking Opera Blues. Sparked off by the Wuhan uprising in October 1911, the Xinhai Revolution (a.k.a. the Revolution of 1911) led to the demise of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644–1911). On January 1, 1912, the Chinese Republic was officially proclaimed, with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of Zhongguo Tongmenghui (a.k.a. the United League or the Revolutionary Alliance), as its provisional president. At the time Yuan Shikai held the balance of power between the Republican revolutionaries and the Qing court. He was a military man by training who, as early as 1895, had risen to the rank of a brigadier in the New Army, and who in 1901 became the minister of Beiyang [Northern Oceans]. Created by the Qing court about a decade earlier and renamed the Beiyang Army in 1902, the New Army was a powerful, Western-style Chinese Imperial army. Although relieved of all his posts in 1909, Yuan kept close contact with his allies in the Qing government and also in the Beiyang Army, especially with protégés such as Duan Qirui (1865–1936), Wang Shizhen (1861–1930), Feng Guozhang (1859–1919), and Cao Kun (1862–1938), all of whom became leading political figures of the warlord period. (In Peking Opera Blues, Warlord Tsao and Warlord Tun, as it so happens, bear the same surname as Cao Kun and Duan Qirui respectively. 2. Tony See Sin Heng, “On Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People: A Philosophy Approach,” in Sun Yat-Sen: Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, eds. Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 30–43.

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It is not clear if the two fictional constructs are, in actuality, based on their historical counterparts. The coincidence is nonetheless uncanny.) After the Wuhan uprising, Yuan was an intermediary for the Qing court and the Republican revolutionaries who had popular support, but who were militarily weak. He arranged the abdication of the last Qing emperor—the child-emperor Puyi (1906–1967)— the announcement of which was formally made in February 1912. This, together with the Beiyang Army as a weapon of coercion, helped Yuan ascend to the presidency in Sun’s place. Although no proponent of democracy, the Republic’s first President nonetheless agreed to hold a national election to pick a new government. Ten months later, the National Assembly elections were duly held, and China had its first taste of electoral democracy. The electorate numbered some forty million, just over 10 percent of the Chinese population. Only men could cast votes. Amidst accusations of intimidation, vote-buying, fraud, and other forms of election shenanigans, the Revolutionary Alliance’s Kuomintang (KMT, a.k.a. Guomindang or Nationalist Party)—also the largest political party—won a significant victory, securing about 45 percent of the seats in both the lower house and upper house, while Pro-Yuan parties suffered setbacks at the polls. Song Jiaoren (1882–1913) headed the Kuomintang election campaigns; his victory speeches were spiced with promises to curb the power of presidency. The president reportedly offered him a huge bribe, but the nearly thirtyyear-old Song had his sights on becoming the Republic’s first prime minister, so he canvassed support from smaller parties to form a majority. Song first met Sun in 1905 in Japan, to which Song had fled after a failed act of rebellion against the Manchu government at his home province the year before. There, he studied Western political thought. Song joined the Tongmenghui which Sun had founded with revolutionary students studying in Tokyo earlier that year. The Tongmenghui was an underground resistance movement whose



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aim was to overthrow the Manchu monarchy. Like the thousands of young Chinese students, reformers, and radicals in Japan, Song was exposed to Enlightenment thinking and the rhetoric of constitutional government and democracy which the Japanese government had introduced in the country since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Tongmenghui’s networks grew to incorporate anti-Manchu secret societies in the Mainland such as Cai Yuanpei’s Restoration Society (Guangfuhui; founded in Zhejiang in 1904) and others, including Sun’s Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui; founded in Hawaii in 1894, with branches in Yokohama, Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora, including Singapore. It sponsored propaganda, fund-raising and insurgent activities that culminated in 1911 with the Wuhan uprising.3 Sun was in Denver, Colorado, when the Xinhai Revolution broke out. After reading about it, he immediately returned to China. By this time, Sun, a Cantonese native, had been in political exile for some sixteen years. He had fled Qing China in 1895 when the anti-Manchu plot he had planned failed.4 In March 1913, Song was assassinated in Shanghai. Although the trail of evidence pointed to the president’s office, Yuan was never officially implicated, while the main conspirators either 3. Jonathan Fenby, “The Silencing of Song,” History Today, March 1, 2013, http://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-fenby/chinese-democracy-silencing-song (accessed May 1, 2015); Anonymous, “The Death of a Revolutionary: The Song of Song,” The Economist, December 22, 2012, http://www. economist.com/news/christmas/21568587-shot-killed-song-jiaoren-wasnot-heard-around-world-it-might-have-changed (accessed May 1, 2015); Encyclopædia Britannica, “Sun Yat-sen,” http://global.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/573697/Sun-Yat-sen/6987/Founding-of-the-UnitedLeague (accessed December 8, 2014). 4. Chong, Sun Yat-sen and the West, 17–53. Ching Fatt Yong, “An Historical Turning Point: the 1911 Revolution and its Impact on Singapore’s Chinese Society,” in Lee and Lee, eds., Sun Yat-sen, 148–69; and Encyclopædia Britannica, “Sun Yat-sen.”

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died or disappeared mysteriously.5 Then Sun attempted a “Second Revolution” to depose Yuan but failed. That summer, Yuan began to crack down on the KMT. In September, Yuan loyalists took Nanking, the bastion of KMT. Before the year was out, the KMT party was dissolved, and Sun left for Japan. In early 1914, Yuan dismissed the parliament, thereafter exerting an authoritarian control based on military dictatorship. His inauguration as Hongxian Emperor of the Chinese Empire in December 1915 was met with military revolts within the ranks and mass protests in the streets. Three months later, Yuan annulled the monarchy. In June 1916, he died of kidney failure In the absence of a generally recognized central authority, compounded by competing factions, his death precipitated a period of warlordism. Galvanized by military governors or senior government officers, including local thugs, who established local armies and power bases and formed alliances among themselves, warlordism caused China to splinter internally. Its reign of “terror, oppression, tax demands, bloodshed, intrigue, and pillaging [would make the next] dozen years a nightmare.”6

5. Fenby, “The Silencing of Song.” 6. James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 90. See also Henry McAleavy, The Modern History of China (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 201–5; Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 275–81; and Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153–54; and Baidu Encyclopedia (Baidu baike), “Hongxian dizhi,” http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=hSOQYSAd3VRBPNd07TEGsAV5vZbg7V3n2kknUUB_0pnXCkL54tJYYvdNHrXBgKNP (accessed February 11, 2014).



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Sun Yat-sen Viewed from the wider context of modern Chinese history, the path to Chinese democracy has been rocky. “Song’s death ended China’s brief flirtation with electoral democracy,” notes Jonathan Fenby, “The country has never again had contested elections of the kind tried in 1913.”7 Successive governments after the collapse of Yuan’s Chinese Empire had indeed consistently put the Chinese democratic project on hold, while the Chinese people had to put up with various forms of turbulence engendered by the feuding warlords following Yuan’s death in 1916. To cite but a few instances: General Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition which ended the rule of the Beiyang government and other warlords (1926–1928) and his campaigns of terror against the Communists (1927–1937); the devastations of the Japanese Occupation (1937–1945); postwar reconstruction and the subsequent Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) between the KMT and the CCP; the “red terror” in Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong)’s New China (1949–1976) that culminated in the tenyear-long Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution; and the repressive logic of economic liberalisation without corresponding democratic reforms during the paramount leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978– 1987). The result was rampant official corruption that was to ignite the prodemocracy uprising of 1989, itself suppressed brutally and violently when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square that summer. The Republican dream of electoral democracy was first mooted at the turn of the twentieth century by revolutionary leaders such as Sun Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren. Sun made his “first acquaintance . . . with political life” via a certain “‘Young China’ party,” while in Macao in 1892, where he attempted to set up a medical practice after graduating from the College of Medicine for Chinese in

7. Fenby, “The Silencing of Song.”

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Hong Kong earlier that year.8 “The prime essence of the movement writes Sun, “was the establishment of a form of constitutional government to supplement the old-fashioned, corrupt, and worn-out system under which China is groaning.”9 His stay in Macao was brief because the colonial government recognized only Portuguese diplomas, which meant that he did not have the license to practice Western medicine there. After making several futile attempts to resolve the situation at “a considerable pecuniary loss,” he left for Canton (Guangzhou), the capital city of his native province.10 In Canton, his ties with the Young China movement grew stronger as its ranks swelled with the discontented and disenchanted, including unemployed soldiers. Their petitions against official corruption and extortion fell on deaf ears: “Finding the door closed to mild means,” writes Sun, “we grew more concrete in our notions and demands, and gradually came to [the realization] that some degree of coercion would be necessary.”11 In the meantime Japan defeated China in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), giving further impetus for the “China Youth” party to plan and stage a coup to depose the authorities in Canton. “The headquarters of the ‘Young China’ party was really in Shanghai, but the scene of action was . . . laid in Canton,” writes Sun.12 The uprising failed. After “several hairbreadth escapes,” Sun made his way to Macao and then Hong Kong, where he subsequently sailed for Honolulu via Kobe and Yokohama (where as a final act of rebellion he cut his queue).13 After a spell with “friends 8. Sun Yat-sen, Kidnapped in London: Being the Story of My Capture by, Detention at, and Released from The Chinese Legation, London (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1897), 9–13. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Ibid., 19–20. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. Ibid., 26, 28. In Qing China, Chinese men were required to grow their



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and well-wishers,” he headed for San Francisco and then proceeded eastward to New York where he boarded a steamship bound for Liverpool, finally arriving in England about a year after fleeing China.14 “Wherever I went,” Sun writes, “I found all intelligent Chinese imbued with the spirit of reform and eager to obtain a form of representative government for their native land.”15 On October 11, 1896, about ten days after Sun’s arrival in London, the Chinese legation kidnapped him with the intention of shipping him back to China to be executed as a rebel and a “leader of the [coup] conspiracy.”16 The British government intervened, eventually securing his release on October 23, 1896. While in exile as a “political refugee,”17 Sun had indeed traveled far and wide, pushing the Republican cause wherever he went and raising funds from overseas Chinese (huaqiao) communities to bankroll uprisings in Manchu China. In addition to Japan and the United States, his exilic journey took him to Europe and Canada as well as Southeast Asia, otherwise known as Nanyang. However as his political fortune rose, the Qing Court exerted increased pressure on foreign governments to shun him.18 In any case, frequent exile characterized Sun’s political life. After the Xinhai Revolution, he was elected provisional president of the Republic of China. He set up the provisional government in Nanking (Nanjing) on January 3, 1911. In March, he signed the provisional constitution which declared, for the first time in Chinese history, that sovereignty was vested in the hair and wear it as a queue as a sign of obedience and allegiance to the emperor. 14. Ibid., 28–30. 15. Ibid., 28, 29. 16. Anonymous, “The Supposed Chinese Revolutionist,” The China Mail, Hong Kong, December 3, 1986; cited ibid., 113. 17. Ibid., 56. 18. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Sun Yat-sen.”

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people and that all the people were equal and enjoyed democratic rights. This constitution was later rescinded by Yuan Shikai.19 During his second exile (1913–1916) and after Yuan Shikai came to power, Sun reorganized the KMT from Japan, renaming it the Chinese Revolutionary Party. When Yuan died in 1916, Sun returned to a warlord China where he then shuttled between Canton and Shanghai. At first he tried to make Canton his revolutionary base for staging a political comeback, but with little success. In 1918, he moved to Shanghai, where he reorganised the Chinese Revolutionary Party as the Chinese KMT, returning to Canton some two years later. In 1921, he was president of a certain Chinese People’s Government. In the summer of 1922, the Guangdong warlord Chen Jiongming disapproved of Sun’s plans to use Canton as a base for a national reunification drive. Sun’s protégé, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), helped him escape to Shanghai. In February 1923, he was back in Canton again following the ousting of Warlord Chen by a new consortium of militarists. Sun set up a military government and gave himself the title of grand marshal. As before, he sought support as widely as he could. Though not a communist, he had been in talks with the Comintern. This led to the KMT-CCP alliance in Canton. In 1924, Sun established the Whampoa Military Academy on the outskirts of Canton, with Chiang Kei-Shek, who had just returned from Moscow where he had studied military organization for several months, as its commandant.20 He died the following year: “[i]n death he was glorified even more than he had been while alive.”21 Sun became a national “icon, a ‘lacquered god’ 19. Chen Xiqi, “Sun Yat-sen and the Founding of the Provisional Nanjing Government,” in The 1911 Revolution in China: Interpretive Essays, eds. Etô Shinkichi and Harold Z. Schiffrin, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), 213, 215. 20. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 334–46. 21. Conrad Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 485.



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whose memory has been appropriated by Nationalist, Communist and even Russian historians to bolster their own versions of history.”22 Chiang Kai-shek succeeded his mentor and went on to become one of the two most influential political leaders of the time, the other being archrival Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Together with the Communists, Chiang mounted the Northern Expedition, bringing an end to the warlordism era in 1928. Establishing his base in Nanking, he then took on the Communists. This precipitated the breakup between the KMT and CCP. Chiang’s continuous efforts to annihilate the CCP forced the Long March in 1933.23 The intense political rivalry between the two political parties eventually culminated in the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949), which erupted just months after the Japanese surrender in 1945. The CCP’s victory on the Mainland led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; this meant banishment for Chiang’s KMT, which retreated to Taiwan and established the Republic of China. Like Mao, Chiang was also a dictator. The emergency decree (a form of martial law), promulgated in 1949, for example, was still in place in Taiwan as late as 1987, or at the time of Peking Opera Blues’ premiere. Meanwhile, since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the PRC has gradually embarked on an open-door policy based on market reforms to develop its economy. As was the case with colonial Hong Kong, economic liberalisation was not accompanied by political autonomy based on democracy.24 22. Stella Dong, Sun Yat-sen: The Man Who Changed China (Hong Kong: FormAsia, 2004), 5. 23. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 341–54, 403–10. 24. The signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of post-1997 Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic occurred in Beijing in 1984. It was executed during Sir Edward Youde’s term as Hong Kong’s colonial governor.

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Sun Yat-sen, to this day, has remained a respected personality in mainland China. His birthplace of Xiangshan is now named after him, that is, Zhongshan. In Taiwan the KMT government has immortalised him as guofu, or father of the nation. Elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora he is remembered as a revolutionary hero who helped bring down the Qing dynasty. In this regard he was unique among twentieth-century Chinese politicians. But like Chiang and Mao, he has had a fair share of followers and critics. Historian Marie-Claire Bergère, for example, appraises him as: a muddled politician, an opportunist with generous but confused ideas, interested first and foremost in conquest and power games . . . In opposition, he was usually impotent, and in the very brief periods when he held the responsibilities of leadership . . . the power of decision eluded him. Nor was he a great theorist.”25

Another historian, Prasenjit Duara, on the other hand, attributes Sun’s popularity among the huaqiao (overseas Chinese), especially those residing in Nanyang (Southeast Asia), to the historical conditions that created the myth of Sun as a dedicated anti-Manchu rebel, and his subsequent deification as the founder of modern China.26 According to Duara, textbooks used in Chinese schools in Nanyang after 1911 promoted “the racial family, fraternity, and colonial mastery”; they also constantly linked the “core images of the secret societies and huaqiao to the Republican revolution.” “Their interiorization as representations of a Chinese national self,” adds Duara, helped deepen support for Sun’s Republicanism.27 Meanwhile the 25. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4. 26. Prasenjit Duara, “Nationalists among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39–60. 27. Ibid., 54, 57–58.



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many other ways in and through which Sun has been commemorated, even commodified, for collective remembrance and popular consumption in the huaqiao communities as well as in mainland China have added to the legend that secured Sun’s place as a folk hero in modern Chinese history. Referred to without warmth in Mao’s China, the late Sun Yat-sen made a “political comeback” in Deng Xiaoping’s China when his portrait replaced Mao Zedong’s in the 1979 National Day celebration at Tiananmen Square, appearing alongside the great forebears—Marx, Engels, and Lenin. This and the call for renewed studies of Sun Yat-sen, suggests Bergère, “signaled the beginning of a new era of reforms and opening-up.”28 The ceremonious unveiling in 2003 of Sun’s statue at the University of Hong Kong, where he trained as a doctor of Western medicine (1887–1892), is another example of Sun’s lasting influence in contemporary times, as were the academic conferences and other commemorative activities marking the hundredth anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in subsequent years.29 In the case of Hong Kong, David Lung, the convenor of the working group for the Sun Yat-sen statue, drew attention to the fact that Sun, a “historical giant,” had returned to his alma mater in 1923, some thirty-one years after graduating, to give a public lecture where he marked the “historic occasion” with the remark that “Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong are the birth place of my knowledge.’30 28. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, 1–2. 29. For example: in October 2010, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Chinese Heritage Centre held an international conference on the threeway relationships between Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang, and the 1911 Revolution at the Sun Yat-sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, Singapore. The conference proceedings have been compiled into an anthology, titled Sun Yat-sen: Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, discussed in this chapter. 30. David Lung, “Foreword,” in Sun Yat-sen on Campus, http://www.hku.hk/ daao/sunyatsen/foreword.html (accessed March 1, 2007).

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For Tsui Hark, born and raised in South Vietnam where Sun has been deified as one of the primary saints of the Vietnamese religion Cao Dai, Sun was “the hero of an epoch” (shidai yingxiong).31 Sun, or for that matter, Song, does not appear physically in Peking Opera Blues. This is historically congruent since the former, at the time of the film’s setting, was in political exile in Japan, while the latter was dead.32 Nonetheless their presence, especially Sun’s, is felt throughout the film; not least of which is the Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) suit which Tsao Wan (Shot 15B), Pak-Hoi, and Tung Man wear occasionally. The Republican spirit for building a democratic China based on sanmin zhuyi as the anti-authoritarian roadmap is otherwise to be found in the contestations between Republican revolutionaries like Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi, and monarchy revivalists like Yuan, though also physically absent in the film, and his proxies such as Commander Lei and his secret police. Set in Peiping in the winter of 1913, where Yuan had enormous sway in both political and military spheres,33 Peking Opera Blues demonstrates that any envisioned Chinese democracy was elusive, then and now. This is the situation not only in the now CCP-controlled mainland, but also in Hong Kong and Macao, then entities seemingly outside the grip of Chinese sovereignty. This is true as well in the KMT-controlled Taiwan, which was engaged in a cold war with the CCP since 1949, although the CCP and KMT have, from the late 1980s onwards, attempted to thaw the chill and improve relations. 31. Tsui, cited in Ho and Fu, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 165. 32. Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series liberally draws on the legends of a Cantonese folk hero, Wong Fei-hung, also a well-known pugilist master. Like the first, the second installment, made in 1992, is set in Canton during the last years of the Qing Dynasty. In this film, as is characteristic of Tsui, he stretches historical facts by staging a fictive meeting between Sun Yat-sen and Wong Fei-hung, although the two never met in their lifetime. 33. The KMT, on the other hand, set up its base in Nanking (Nanjing), some nine hundred kilometers south of Peiping.



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To reconstruct the historicity of the era described in this chapter, the film makes allusions to influential personalities of that milieu such as Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai, alongside fictionalized entities such as the two warlords, General Tsao (Cao) and General Tun (Duan), who, as mentioned before, uncannily have the same surname as two of Yuan’s protégés—Cao Kun and Duan Qirui, who later became respectively the president (1922–1924) and prime minister (1916–1920) of the dysfunctional Chinese Republic. It is perhaps also not entirely coincidental that Tsao Wan’s and PakHoi’s close ally-in-revolution, Manager Sung of the Minsheng (People’s Voices) Press, would bear the same surname as Song Jiaoren. (In Chinese both Sung and Song is the same character; the romanized spelling is different because the former uses Cantonese inflexion, while the latter follows the Mandarin phonetic system.) The melding of historical iconicities—whether in the form of famous names (e.g., Sun and Yuan), inferred personalities (e.g., Warlords Tsao and Tun), significant locations (e.g., Peiping and Nanking), or for that matter, sartorial fashions (e.g., the Zhongshan suit), including the coin that bears an effigy of Yuan and the news photo bearing a picture of Yuan in the fictive Minsheng newspaper—sets the film’s fiction-historical continuum for rethinking and reimagining the Chinese democratic dream of the Republican period. This dream, as I argue in this book, has parasocial lessons, in jiegu fengjin ways, for contemporary Hong Kong of the 1980s, as it grappled with the realities of an impending change of sovereignty from British colonial rule to Chinese communist rule.34 In an interview in 1988, Tsui Hark, speaking about Peking Opera Blues and its place within and its use of this sort of historical context and hindsight as a mode of enunciation, commentary and deconstruction, said: 34. Jiegu fengjin refers to a Chinese mode of social criticism that uses the historical past, to comment on, even lampoon, the present.

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[T]he film clearly takes a poke at the audience, saying that Chinese people do not know what democracy is. The first democratic revolution collapsed because of a power struggle . . . [T]he film also takes a sly poke at the current government.35

In a way my historical commentary so far about the Chinese quest for the promised but elusive democracy since the Republican days mirrors, in some ways, Hong Kong’s 1980s political landscape and also China’s long march towards democracy, enabling a rethinking—from the perspectives of Hong Kong—of the territory’s past, present, and future relations with China. The rethinking provides narrative motivations in Peking Opera Blues that metonymically connect Republican idealisms to contemporary realities in colonial Hong Kong in a Janus-faced way. It bears emphasizing again that Peking Opera Blues was made about two years after China and Britain signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in September 1984. The negotiations over the future of the British colony when its lease of the New Territories was to expire in 1997 began as early as 1982. Hong Kong’s colonial rulers never granted Hong Kong people any form of self-governance.36 So it should come as no sur35. Tsui, cited in Pat Aufderheide, “Dynamic Duo,” Film Comment 24, no. 3 (May–June 1988): 44. 36. Recently declassified colonial documents reveal that the British government had considered granting Hong Kong “self-governance” as early as 1958 but shelved the plan when Premier Zhou Enlai warned that the Chinese government would regard this as an “unfriendly act.” Not long thereafter, in 1960, Liao Chengzhi, China’s director of “Overseas Chinese Affairs,” reinforced the Chinese position, saying that China would “not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories liberated” if Britain allowed self-governance. The veiled threat to invade the colony was repeated again during the Joint Declaration negotiations in 1982 when Deng Xiaoping told Margaret Thatcher: “If there were very large and serious disturbances in the next fifteen years, the Chinese government would be forced to consider the time and formula relating to the recovery of its sovereignty over Hong



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prise that the negotiations were conducted in total secrecy without local Hong Kong representation and also without consulting with the people of Hong Kong—perhaps not unlike the secret manner in which General Tsao sews up the loan deal with foreign bankers. In Hong Kong the renewed question of democracy as an instituted way of life surfaced in the run-up to the secret negotiations. It gathered momentum after Zhao Ziyang and Margaret Thatcher signed the joint declaration in Beijing two years later. The declaration contains a draft of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which permits the PRC government to resume sovereignty over Hong Kong after 1997 and to govern it as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) under the “one country, two systems” principle. Short of self-governance, then, Article 45 of the Basic Law eventually envisions “universal suffrage” as the mode for electing the HKSAR’s chief executive, in a manner that both abides by “the principle of gradual and orderly progress” and accords with “democratic procedures.”37 But if, as Tsui has stated cynically, “Chinese people do not know what democracy is,” then how can they struggle for it, let alone appreciate its value? In Peking Opera Blues General Tsao, for example, chooses to ignore the “bigger picture” which his daughter points to as the Kong.” As sociologist Ho-Fung Hung sums up, “[T]he newly declassified documents reveal [that] China’s leaders explicitly wanted to ‘preserve the colonial status of Hong Kong,’” though both governments had “benefited . . . [by] seeking neither democracy nor an invasion.” Gwynn Guilford, “Declassified: The Secret History of Hong Kong’s Stillborn democracy,” Quartz, October 10, 2014, http://qz.com/279013/the-secret-history-of-hong-kongs-stillborn-democracy/ (accessed May 12, 2015). 37. Hong Kong Basic Law, “Chapter IV: Political Structure,” http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_4.html (accessed May 12, 2015). The Basic Law was formally adopted on April 4, 1990, by the Seventh National People’s Congress (NPC) of the People’s Republic of China, and went into effect on July 1, 1997. The Basic Law draft in the Joint Declaration initially made no provision for “universal suffrage” as such.

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roadmap to a democratic China. He is not alone, however. Tsao Wan’s friends like Pat Neil, Sheung Hung, and Tung Man prefer personal pursuits and gains over high-aiming political goals. Still others like Fa Gum-Sao may have no inkling of these goals at all. Finally, asking about Tsui’s “pokes” at government, current or otherwise, in Peking Opera Blues invites a rethinking of the Chinese democratic project, self-reflexively and self-consciously assessing its failure and achievements. This includes, perhaps most particularly, raising the question as to how the project has managed to slip through the fingers of successive governments since the Republican days due to “power struggles” that have pushed the people to the sidelines. However, I shall not burden such a film with a too finely drawn set of political expectations given that there are many other, not necessarily political, “pokes” to engage with. In particular, some can be found through the intertextual lens of what might in hindsight be described as a companion piece to Peking Opera Blues, Tsui Hark’s earlier (1984) Shanghai Blues, to which I now turn. Both films are, as this chapter has been, deeply engaged with questions about nationhood and nationalism in modern China. Peking Opera Blues is closely related intertextually to Shanghai Blues, which Tsui Hark produced, directed and scripted some two years earlier. Both films are set in Chinese cities: Peiping of 1913, and wartime Shanghai in 1937 at first and then postwar Shanghai around 1946. In narration they have in common the jiegu fengjin spirit for unpacking the “blues” of a people caught in the vagaries of political uncertainties and social upheavals that turn lives and livelihoods topsy-turvy. Like a type of perplexing rebus that articulates the cultural mentality and social mutation of space and time, the two movies draw analogies between desires and fears in China’s past and those clouding Hong Kong’s present uncertainties, underscoring fiction as imagined history that articulates metafictions about the interactivity of film, culture, and society—themes I explore in more detail in the next chapter.

Act 3

Shanghai and Peking Blues: Fiction as Imagined History Genre Peking Opera Blues does not lend itself easily to genre pigeonholing, though the IMDB webpage (2007) has labeled it a “comedy” and an “action” film.1 This “perfect blend of action, comedy and suspense,” suggests blogger Trigonas (2004), makes “Tsui Hark’s greatest film . . . the Indiana Jones of Hongkong movies!’2 Lisa Morton, the author of The Cinema of Tsui Hark (2001), similarly praises it but is less certain about where and how to place “Tsui Hark’s best film,” which “seems to float free of the entire history of cinema, with few obvious influences . . . [so much so that it creates] its own genre.” She thus wonders if Peking Opera Blues is a “feminist . . . action thriller,” 1. International Movie Database, “Do Ma Daan (1986),” www.imdb.com (accessed March 31, 2007). 2. Trigonias, “Dao Ma Daan (1986): This is Tsui Hark’s Greatest Film!”, http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0090952/board/nest/45643147?ref_=tt_bd_1 (accessed December 29, 2013). Dao Ma Daan is the Cantonese name for the film’s Chinese title.

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or “period-comedy-women’s-actioner.”3 This “film of exuberance,” writes Jenny Lau (2005) appreciatively, has been “wildly popular with audiences in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and with fans in the West”: it combines the “martial-arts genre” with “modernized gunplay . . . cartoon kung fu violence, and slapstick,” exemplifying “the best of the Hong Kong New Wave in its visual expression and in its self-reflexive interpretation of old themes.”4 For David Bordwell (2000), this “historical adventure” film and “bedroom farce” suggests that “Tsui’s style may be inspired by Spielberg.”5 Roy Hoban of The Village Voice (1995) raises the hype-register further, declaring that the film “out-Spielbergs Spielberg.”6 Fredric Dannen and Barry Long (1997) eschew generic labels altogether, seeing this “masterpiece” as a demonstration of Tsui’s “ability to combine farce, pageantry, drama and stuntwork.”7 These reviews collectively make clear that Peking Opera Blues is a mixed-genre film built out of allusions to and stylizations of other film genres and texts. The recourse to allusions and stylizations thus suspends the primary generic force as the sole creative determinant, but not the generic structure that generally characterizes the narrative film; or in this particular case, what Tsui Hark has conceived of as an “entertaining and funny,” “women-centered” film that casts actresses in “roles usually played by male actors.”8 Intertextuality—the self-conscious process in textual production 3. Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark, 65, 66. 4. Lau, “Peking Opera Blues,” 741–42. 5. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 16, 136, 142. 6. Roy Hoban, cited in Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan Books, 1995), 106. 7. Fredic Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider’s Guide to the Hollywood of the East (New York: Miramax Book, 1997), 135, 280. 8. Tsui, cited in Cheung and Cheuk, “Tsui Hark on Tsui Hark,” 177.



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by which a text cites another, and the way texts are constituted by their relationships with other texts (and genres)—thus buttresses its authority and credibility as a mixed-genre film. This in turn enriches its “addressivity.”9 As the reviews also make amply obvious, this enriched addressivity, or “the focal point of an address,”10 has engendered a global reach for the mixed-genre film. The film’s Chinese title, Dao Ma Dan, on the other hand, presents a different type of challenge. The US release title of the film—“Knife, Horse, Dawn,”11—in particular, highlights some of the problems of cross-lingual translation for a quintessentially Chinese theatrical concept that refers to a specific female warrior role-type in Peking opera: it is a little too literal and off-the-mark as well. (I will elaborate on this role-type further on.) As for the film’s English title, Tsui had reportedly toyed with the idea of simply calling it “Peking Opera.” He eventually added the word “Blues” when his wife and collaborator, Nansun Shi, advised him to draw an intertextual link to the musical hit, Shanghai Blues (dir. Tsui Hark, 1984), which the couple had produced two years earlier.12 Shanghai Blues (whose Chinese title literally means Shanghai’s nights), was also Film Workshop’s debut feature film, and Peking Opera Blues thus became a companion piece, in more senses than one. The term “blues” in the films’ titles parallels the blues in the film, and can generally be understood in the sense of someone “having the blues.” It is akin to blues music to the extent that the two films similarly express the affectivity of brooding that variously expresses worry, despondency, and melancholy in sentimental and sentimentalizing ways, while mixing in sadness and hope, anguish 9. John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2005), 42–47. 10. Mary Ann Doane, “Subjectivity and Desire: An(other) Way of Looking,” in Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope (London: Longman, 1993), 171. 11. Lau, “Peking Opera Blues,” 739. 12. Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark, 70.

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and humor.13 Like blues musicians who sing about a love object longingly and hopefully, the blues in the film, Peking Opera Blues, amongst other things, ruminates over the Republicans’ cherished dream of creating a democratic Chinese Republic, while jazzing up themes of revolutionary passion and commitment in turbulent times, showing a country’s difficult and often violent transition from monarchism to republicanism and its often adverse impact on people’s lives.

Shanghai Blues (1984) Shanghai Blues sings a slightly different blues tune. It reflects contemplatively on the blues of urbanites who find their lives turned topsy-turvy, briefly at first in the prologue, by the Japanese invasion in 1937; and then equally, if not more devastatingly, in the main story, as the Chinese Civil War encroaches upon Shanghai in the Republican China of 1947. The prologue depicts a city in chaos as the inhabitants flee the Japanese bombing. Among the bolting mob are Do-Re-Mi and Shu-Shu (played by Kenny Bee and Sylvia Chang respectively), who then meet by chance under a bridge. There, in the dark, the two strangers console each other as the city burns. The main story introduces the film’s third protagonist, Stool (Sally Yeh). Somewhat naïve and clumsy, this country girl comes to Shanghai looking for her relatives, hoping that they would take her in. Instead, she finds an abandoned house. A pickpocket steals all her money. Wandering despondently in the streets late that night, she falls into a river by accident. Shu-shu, who happens to walk by, saves her. Shu-shu, now a cabaret performer, takes in the homeless Stool; the two soon live together as sister-friends. Now an unemployed music composer, Do-re-mi also lives in the tenement. 13. Langston Hughes, “Songs Called the Blues,” Phylon (1940–1956) 2, no. 2 (1941): 143–45.



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A triangular romantic relationship develops between the three as they stumble from misadventure to mishap, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, the down and out as well as the vicious and devious, and the bent and crooked in the city which as the opening song enthuses has become a “playground for the adventurer, paradise for the tycoon, joyous land for the ladies, and warm haven for the gentlemen.”14 Behind the glittery glamour are the blues of a people, as in Peking Opera Blues: caught in the vagaries of sociopolitical chaos that have engendered national calamities, social tragedies, communal disturbances, and personal traumas, they all try to get on with their lives as best as they can. The theme of the blues in both films—the blues of particular communities or individuals thrown up by turbulent times—is therefore a register of emotional and psychological mood shifts that correspond with the choppy tumults of social changes. In the films, such moods are conveyed through and glimpsed in their elliptical and episodic modes of storytelling that often swing between, and also in tandem with, the films’ frenzied movements and quiet, contemplative moments. This yields narrative oscillations. Bobbing and bouncing with razor-fast editing, hyperkinetic quick cuts, and campy comic-book characters who zip in and out of the diegesis rapidly, the oscillations throw out storylines that boggle the mind when they are often narrated as if on the run. All these, in turn, noisily and hilariously interrupt narrative flows, spawning narratives about surviving and resisting the odds, as well as the durability of personal courage and collective strength. In addition to the theme of the blues, both films also use narrative devices that mesh historicity and fictionality, creating a narrative framed by historical fiction (history imagined into fiction) and 14. In Chinese the lyrics go like this: 冒險家樂園／大富翁天堂／淑女開心地／紳 士溫柔鄉. Unless otherwise stated, the translations of song lyrics in this book are mine.

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fictionalized history (fiction imagined as history). This narrative framing strategically calls forth what may be theorized as a jiegu fengjin mode of social and political criticism. As criticism, the jiegu fengjin method, which literally means using the past to comment on or lampoon the present, encourages “allegorical”15 readings of history in relation to fiction, and vice versa. It emphasizes self-reflexivity and self-introspection and seeks, as it also grants, critical distance between the object of critique and the criticism itself. It advocates a critical reviewing and rethinking of the past through the wisdom of historical hindsight, purposefully generating lessons of history for contemporary contemplation and learning. What is most vital about the jiegu fengjin mode of narration or criticism offered by the two Blues films, especially in the context of relating the films’ political relevance to 1980s Hong Kong, is that it yokes together, in metafictional ways, a spatio-temporal imaginary that sutures the past (e.g., turbulent times in China of yore) to the present (e.g., political uncertainties in contemporary Hong Kong), while simultaneously seeking to engage the future (e.g., Hong Kong’s futurity as a special administrative region under Chinese sovereignty after 1997).16 Lin Qiying suggests this when she notes in her review of Peking Opera Blues that: Most of Tsui Hark’s movies display a slant for narrating troubled times . . . Tsui Hark likes [to use] chaos [as a theme] . . . because this allows him to “yanzhi,” or express and reflect, in a poetic way, the direct, root causes of tumultuous chaos linked to human weaknesses, especially selfishness. Humans would pursue self-preservation in troubled times. When good order is not yet in place, the forces are inverted to the extent that even the question of people’s livelihood becomes an embarrassment . . . Tsui Hark’s 15. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn (London: New Left Books, 1977). 16. Tan, “Surfing with the Surreal in Tsui Hark’s Wave,” 33–50.



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past works are full of anarchism . . . Here he ultimately attaches importance to human power because politics is like a game, and also because the system cannot be trusted . . . To pursue a new order, one must work hard . . . Tsui Hark’s yanzhi thus emphasizes the collective power of the elites [to build a good order].17

In the specific case of Shanghai Blues, Shu-Shu had lost her family when the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1937. Ten years later, after the Japanese surrender, she has managed to rebuild her life in the war-ravaged city. But sociopolitical upheavals loom again, this time in the form of the Chinese Civil War. This eventually compels her to face, like many of her compatriots in the Hong Kong-bound train, the uncertain prospect of starting a new life yet again in a strange land called Hong Kong. The move also means leaving behind her beloved home and close friends such as Stool, who has decided to remain in Shanghai.

Peking Opera Blues (1986) Similarly, leaving for the new and unknown is heavily featured in Peking Opera Blues. The film opens with Warlord Tun and his twenty-eight wives fleeing their palatial abode when his army mutinied (Scenario 3c). Towards the end of the film, General Tsao, after losing the secret document, asks his daughter to pack up and leave with him (Scenario 23a). Elsewhere in the film, while spinning a globe by the fireplace in Tsao Wan’s mansion, Sheung Hung tells her friends, Tsao Wan and Pat Neil: “Everyone is talking about leaving [Peiping] . . . They want to flee from death.” (Scenario 12a) It is not difficult to understand why: Peiping is clearly a dangerous place, and the warlords and their soldiers are portrayed as highly 17. Lin Qiying, “Encountering Turbulent Times Again: Peking Opera Blues” [Zai feng luanshi: Dao ma dan], Film Biweekly 197 (September 25, 1986): 40.

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strung and trigger-happy. They are predisposed to shoot indiscriminately, often at the drop of a hat, causing violent and sudden deaths to themselves and also to civilians regardless of whether they are armed or not. At the end of the film, Sheung Hung, after witnessing more bloody carnage, thus declares her decision to leave China the moment she has made enough money to do so. The metaphor of wars, together with the desire to flee from turbulent times, in Peking Opera Blues, or for that matter, Shanghai Blues, thus analogize, in a jiegu fengjin way, the politically uncertain times in 1980s Hong Kong (which also saw an upsurge of emigration in anticipation, and as a consequence, of the 1984 Joint Declaration18). This is despite the promise of “one country, two systems” in the declaration which would allow Hong Kong to retain its capitalist system and its way of life for fifty years after 1997. In Peking Opera Blues, the painted face, first seen in the film’s opening, and then again at the film’s curtain call, most embodies the jiegu fengjin mode of social criticism when his second appearance, though bellowing robustly as he has before, returns with the clout of historical hindsight. The metafictional ironies that emerge from the film’s jiegu fengjin critique in this instance multiply, especially when the shot of the painted face is viewed in close relation to the preceding scene depicting Tsao Wan bidding farewell to her friends: “Let’s meet in Peiping again in democratic times,” she says to them as they disperse on horseback. Two of these five riders are Tsao Wan herself and Ling Pak-Hoi: both are patriotic Republicans who, as we saw earlier, have the mission to steal a secret document implicating Yuan in the treacherous scheme of monarchical revival. 18. Cait Murphy, “Hong Kong: A Culture of Emigration/Destination: Canada, Belize, the Federal Republic of Corterra,” The Atlantic Online (April 1991), http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/91apr/emi491.htm (accessed December 26, 2013). The numbers tell part of the story on the brain drain: the rate of emigration in the early 1980s was about 20,000 per year; in 1987 the number rose to 30,000, and in 1988 and 1989 to more than 40,000.



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The other three riders are Sheung Hung, Pat Neil, and Tung Man. Neither patriots nor political nationalists, they are, in actuality, reluctant participants of the noble mission. Caught in a life and death struggle between Republican patriots and promonarchist agents, the three become accidental revolutionaries when they help Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi accomplish their mission. At the rocky terrain, as the film’s multiple storylines converge for a closure, these five young people talk briefly about their immediate plans. Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi announce their decision to deliver the secret document to the Republican headquarters in Nanking (which as history would have it, had become the bastion for Yuan loyalists). Sheung Hung is a musician, a gold digger and petty thief—all rolled into one. She expresses her wish to leave China but recognizes that she has to make enough money first. This draws an analogy with those who wish to but cannot leave China during turbulent times. The analogy can in turn be extended to include those who, like Sheung Hung, do not yet have the economic means to do so, as well as well-heeled Hongkongers of the 1980s who could afford the ticket for emigration to a foreign country. For those who choose or have to stay behind, their predicaments are probably not too dissimilar from Tung Man’s and Pat Neil’s—both of them have learned to make the best of their situation. Tung Man, an unemployed soldier, settles for the prospect of tending the land in his home village, saying with a dose of self-deprecating good humor that as a farmer, he would be able to stay out of and away from the chaos of turbulent times. Pat Neil likewise weighs her options, and eventually decides to rejoin her father, who has moved his opera troupe to the port city of Tianjin (which is a little over a hundred kilometers southeast of Peiping). In so doing, she knows fully well that she still has to contend with the strictures and prejudice against women performing on stage. Perhaps she hopes that her father would one day break away from convention and value female opera performers. Whatever the future may hold, it is crucial at the

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present moment that she sticks with her father—through thick and thin, as close-knitted families are supposed to do. In sum, all five desire a better tomorrow, and if this tomorrow has a democratic way of life, all the better. Tsao Wan, a Republican patriot, is a foreign-trained doctor of Western medicine (like Sun Yat-sen). As I suggested earlier, Tsao Wan and other Republican democrats such as Pak-Hoi and Manager Sung of Minsheng Press collectively personify the Republican revolutionary spirit when they risk their lives to expose Yuan’s anti-Republican conspiracy. Tsao Wan’s revolutionary fervor, however, amounts to an act of personal betrayal: “My father will never, never forgive me if he ever finds out [about my duplicity],” she confides to Pak-Hoi, adding: “He trusts me completely.” To help usher in the new (a democratic Chinese Republic), Tsao Wan thus turns her back on the old (autocratic monarchy). She wrestles with her conscience, and makes a quiet plea to her pro-Yuan father to see the “big picture” for building a democratic China, instead of succumbing to personal ego. “Without me, there is no big picture”— her father has said to her instead. Little wonder, then, that before dispersing, the five friends agree to meet again in Peiping in a more democratic time (but which, as history would have it, would not have happened since democratic times never dawn upon Peiping). Just before they agree to this, we have seen the death of Commander Lei. Commander Lei, before his fall from the rooftop, worked in the shadows for President Yuan (never seen in person except in the form of a newspaper photograph and an effigy on a minted coin in Scenarios 10a and 11c respectively). As Yuan’s secret police, Lei and his men represent the very antithesis of the “democratic time” dreamed of by the five young riders at the end of the film. Their role has been to ensure that Yuan (a similar antithetical foil to democracy) would be able to secure foreign bank loans via one of the dominant warlords—that is, Warlord Tsao—for equipping his army to bring about a monarchist revival. Peking Opera



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Blues portrays the monarchist supporters, from the warlords to the secret police, as a band of lawless thugs. These thugs epitomize the sort of incivility and criminality (again the opposite of sound democratic principles) embodied in the Chinese notion of hengqi badao, or the obstructive heng-energy that perverts public order and prevents social progress. The term “heng,” though literally meaning horizontal, metaphorically describes situations of contestation between the immoral and the righteous. When the heng-energy takes a decisively negative turn, it would not only interfere with but also disrupt the positive energies in the smooth flow of things, resulting in terrifying effects and violent consequences. Anti-democratic thugs such as Warlords Yuan, Tsao, and Tun, as well as Commander Lei and his secret police, otherwise known as the “tax men” from the ticketing office, are thus constructed as hengxing badao figures with hengxing bufa characteristics. That is to say, they are extremely violent bullies who exert their fearsome presence by—to translate the respective Chinese expression, “moving in a horizontal line (hengxing) that blocks the pathways (badao),” thereby showing the “criminal” (bufa) conduct of hengxing and badao. Such hengxing badao, or hengxing bufa people are, as suggested in the stern reproach of chailang badao, comparable to animals such as jackals (chai) and wolves (lang). The term “heng” in all these Chinese expressions carries the inflexion of incivility, criminality and brutality. The secret police, for example, display heng-energy that marks them as animal-like hooligans with heng-traits. They clearly have scant regard for anyone they deem as a threat to their interests, including civilians who happen to cross their path. They do not hesitate to extort money opportunistically, as in the “comic” scene (Scenario 5c) where they demand to see the wife of Boss Wong before releasing his daughter (Pat Neil), whereupon Boss Wong promptly delivers a pouch of coins as redemption cash. Pointing to the small pouch, the tax men express their dissatisfaction: “How come your wife is so thin? Shouldn’t she be

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fatter?” The intentional construction of Yuan’s secret police as tax men who are brutal killers and greedy extortionists additionally invokes other Chinese proverbs containing the heng character, such as hengke baolian, hengfu baolian, hengzheng baolian, and hengzheng kelian. In this paradigm of heng proverbs, the “heng” character, while generally referring to the heng acts of plundering and pillaging, also specifically identifies the extortion of money, euphemistically known as taxes, as heng behavior. As Commander Lei falls to his death, the four characters of putian tongqing on the memorial archway loom large. At first glance they would seem to conform to the Chinese practice of writing a henglian, although a richer semiotic reading of the narrative context in which the horizontal banner is found would have to take into account the connotative meanings of heng as metaphors for the uncivilized and criminal auras that shroud the environments in which the archway is erected. In an ironic way, the heng-ness on the archway alludes to the heng-forces inherent in the power struggle, enacted in the film, between the monarchy revivalists and the Republican democrats. Depicted as the heng or dark forces in Republican China, the tax men expectedly don dark-colored clothes, while Inspector Lei’s death prompts another cinematic cliché when the final shot of Lei looking at the archway, clearly dead but eyes wide open, is immediately cross-dissolved with a cutaway shot showing sunbeams peeking through dark clouds. As the rising sun disperses the clouds, the film suddenly cuts to the shot of five horses galloping into sight, somewhere in the outskirts of Peiping. Against a rocky terrain and in broad daylight, these five riders, after a night of violent and bloody battle with the tax men, pause for a brief conversation. If the broad daylight symbolizes a brand new day, then the rocky terrain would seem to indicate an uncertain future. It is little surprise that the return of the painted face, immediately after these five ride away from the rocky place, dreaming of better, more democratic times in China, bellows with laughter with



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a (self-)mocking quality that among other things undercuts such revolutionary optimism for a democratic time in China which Tsao Wan and her fellow revolutionary, Pak-Hoi, in particular, embody and personify.

Hong Kong in the 1980s Looking back at the past in Shanghai (Shanghai Blues) and Peiping (Peking Opera Blues) through the lens of the present, as the two Blues films do analogously, vicariously and parodically, represents a mediated response, I would suggest, to the changes taking place in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The recurrent themes of turbulent times foster imaginary historical-fictional narrative sites that link Hong Kong’s political, cultural and emotional connectedness, past and present, to China. This intersects with present concerns for, and anxieties over, decolonized Hong Kong’s postcolonial fate apropos of the impending historic handover in 1997, after nearly one and a half centuries of British colonial rule. In the two Blues films, wars are a trope for turbulent times. Internecine, or otherwise, wars in early twentieth century China have exacted violent displacement and massive dislocation. Little surprise, then, that the two Blues movies engage with the questions of home and belonging and the related issues of identity crisis consequent in turbulent times. But does the bellowing laughter of the painted face signify celebration? Or is it laced with the cynicism of historical hindsight? The answer to the first question, I think, has to be in the affirmative, if viewed in the context that Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi have successfully accomplished their mission with the help of their friends. The answer to the second question should also be in the affirmative, I would suggest, when viewed in the context of historical facts. As the course of modern Chinese history since the Republican times would have it, this group of friends would never meet again in their lifetime if the condition of reunion is more democratic times. Despite

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their success at stealing the secret document that would implicate Yuan Shikai as having monarchist ambitions, this would not have changed the fact that Republican leaders such as Sun were indeed forced into political exile, mostly in Japan, after failing to depose Yuan in July 1913, who, as it turned out then ascended the imperial throne as Emperor Hongxian of the Chinese Empire eighteen months later. Although Yuan’s reign as a monarch was short-lived, and although his empire collapsed soon after his death, successive governments under the charge of leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong and his successors, including Deng Xiaoping, kept a tight lid on building a democratic China based on universal suffrage, or Sun’s Three Principles of the People. Commenting on the political state of affairs since Republican times, then, the bellowing laughter thus powerfully expresses ambivalence with regards to the idealism of Chinese Republicanism and the promises of the joint declaration, because in both instances they were not yet in place. Peking Opera Blues specifically probes the question of democracy (a new and imported idea) with respect to the historical legacy of authoritarianism during the Republican era, in a jiegu fengjin way. This brings out lessons of history from the film that demand addressivity along the past-present-future continuum marked by China of yore at one end, and at the other, Hong Kong of 1986. For Hongkongers who long regarded the autocratic central government in Beijing with suspicion or mixed feelings, the Joint Declaration (signed about two years before the release of Peking Opera Blues) was not a source of comfort. The draft of the Basic Law, while instituting the “one country, two systems” for incorporating Hong Kong into the fold of the Chinese motherland, is silent on the matter of universal suffrage, though the rectified version, formally adopted in 1990 at the PRC’s Seventh National People’s Congress (NPC), contains such a provision. The proposal in the draft that a Hong Kong garrison of the People’s Liberation Army be stationed in the territory after 1997 as its defense force was equally unsettling;



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this was not so much because Hong Kong has never had an army but rather because of its distrust of the autocratic Beijing Central Government. (That garrison is now under the direct leadership of the Central Military Commission in Beijing and under administrative control of the Guangzhou Military Region.) Peking Opera Blues thus asks the question, again in a jiegu fengjin way with respect to the future of Hong Kong in the run up to the handover, and thereafter: Whither democracy? Will and can political self-determination indeed happen as promised in the Sino-British joint declarations? But the two Blues films do more than serve as a jiegu fengjin document for (re)visioning China’s past in the light of Hong Kong’s present. They also manifest a strong postmodern tendency which, like the jiegu fengjin critique, similarly seeks to establish a dialogue with the past.19 I explore this dialogue between past and present by now moving on to explore the intertextual relationship between the “present” of the film and the “past” metaphorically and metonymically embodied in the cultural phenomenon of Peking Opera, which so heavily informs the film. I do so by reading Peking Opera Blues as a postmodern shadowplay of attractions which has the characteristics of an on-screen vaudeville show. I integrate Tom Gunning’s idea of preindustrialized filmmaking in the West as a “cinema of attractions” with the Chinese notion of film as “electric shadowplay” (dianguang yingxi, or in short, dianying).20 As a form 19. That said, I want to emphasize here that the two are different in terms of theoretical conception. Whereas the jiegu fengjin critique engages the past, with the view of retrieving lessons of history for contemporary learning, the postmodern dialogue with the past, its particular disdain for the original that, among other things, yields collages of pastiches, would accede more to cultural matters than political ones. This, I would say, is the most defining distinction between the two modes of social criticism. 20. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space—Frame—Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62.

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of electric shadowplay, dianying is distinct to film in that the term incorporates yingxi, a traditional form of entertainment that uses a lantern to throw puppet shadows against a screen. It also gestures towards the historical processes of sinicization that have rendered the film apparatus, initially thought of as a quintessentially foreign form of amusement in China, and also as an imported technology, with Chinese characteristics. In the next chapter I explore Peking opera conventions, including the painted face motif, first discussed in Act One, in fuller detail and their parodic invocation in Peking Opera Blues that yields postmodern pastiches.

Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 51–58. See also, for example, Chen Xihe, “Shadowplay: Chinese Film Aesthetics and Their Philosophical and Cultural Fundamentals,” in Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to a New Era, eds. George S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, trans. Hou Jianping, Li Xiaohong, and Fan Yuan (Westport and London: Praeger, 1990), 192–204.

Act 4

The Shadowplay of Attractions and Painted Faces Playing with the Pieces Peking opera is a form of traditional Chinese theater. Its performance integrates music, vocal routines, mime, dance, and acrobatics. Emerging in the late eighteenth century, it became fully developed and recognized by the mid-nineteenth century.1 This theater was enormously popular in the Qing dynasty court, and has come to be deemed as one of the cultural treasures of China.2 The stylistic and formal blending of genres in the two Blues films yields variety shows variously composed of song and dance revues, opera performance, acrobatic acts, and comical acts. This is evocative of Tom Gunning’s idea of “cinema of attractions,” but with a difference. Whereas Gunning develops the idea through a study of early films (black and white, silent shorts made before 1. Joshua S. Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3. 2. Colin Patrick Mackerras, “Theatre and the Taipings,” Modern China 2, no. 4 (1976): 473–501.

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filmmaking became industrialized),3 the two Blues films are contemporary products of a highly industrialized era: they are feature-length movies made in color and most crucially, with sound as well. Yet they are similar to Gunning’s notion of the “cinema of attractions” to the extent that they offer multiple forms of viewing pleasure that “directly solicited spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle—a unique event . . . that is of interest in itself.”4 The associated blending of the cinematic, the theatrical and the dramatic in the two Blues films, in similarly conjuring up amazing spectacles that emphasize visuality, performance and movement, also dovetails with the Chinese notion of film as “electric shadowplay” (dianguang yingxi, or in short, dianying).5 According to Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006), and other Chinese film theorists such as Zhong Dafeng, Zhen Zhang and Yingjin Zhang (1997), Chen Xihe (1990), Li Suyuan (1994) and Lu Hongshi (1992),6 dianying is a composite of yingxi or dengyingxi and Western shadowplay (xiyang yingxi), or moving shadowplay (huodong yingxi). Yingxi was a traditional form of entertainment that uses a lantern to throw puppet shadows against a screen, while the latter was regarded, initially, as a quintessentially foreign form of amusement—that is, as a new and imported technology. As early films were to the West 3. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 56–62. 4. Ibid., 58–59. 5. Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, 51. 6. Ibid., Chen, “Shadowplay,” 192–204; Zhong Dafeng, Zhen Zhang, and Yingjin Zhang, “From Wenmingxi [Civilized Play] to Yingxi [Shadowplay]: The Foundations of the Shanghai Film Industry in the 1920s,” Asian Cinema 9, no. 1 (1997): 46–64; Li Suyuan, “About Film Theories in Early Cinema” [Guanyu Zhongguo zaoqi dianying lilun], Contemporary Chinese Cinema [Dangdai dianying] 61, no. 4 (1994): 21–34; Lu Hongshi, “Evaluations of Ren Qingtai and First Chinese Films” [Ren Qingtai yu shoupi guochanpian kaoping], Film Arts [Dianying yishu] 2 (1992): 82–86.



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before cinema houses proliferated, dianying used to be part of the variety shows in China. They typically played in teahouses, theaters and vaudeville venues alongside acrobatics (baxi), magic shows (xifa), circus routines (maxi), song-and-dance routines (gewu) and opera (xiju). That is to say, dianying, albeit of the black-and-white, silent variety, was an attraction of vaudeville(-like) shows. To differentiate this from Gunning’s “cinema of attractions,” I would call the Chinese cinematic variety the “shadowplay of attractions” in that dianying, though technically and materially similarly to films, have historically been subjected to processes of sinicization. The sinicization of films primarily has involved rendering the film apparatus, construed as a foreign technology, with Chinese characteristics. As hybrids of sorts, the resultant dianying also points to “a syncretic Chinese modernity onscreen” that parallels the country’s “transition from empire to modern nation-state.”7 Contemporary dianying like Tsui’s two Blues films are shadowplays of attraction precisely because, following Yeh Yueh-Yu’s general yet insightful study of Tsui Hark’s film corpus in relation to music, they attract audiences with their “sense of wonder, especially through twists of genre, sets, action choreography and art design”; “accelerate[d] . . . narrative rhythm”; “ever-changing plot twists (while keeping the story simple)”; and finally with “[aural] excitement . . . [that complements] the high-speed editing of the visual track.”8 In sum, the two Blues movies offer pleasure that is akin to watching a film and a dianying concurrently. The wonders of ying (shadows or films), the spectacles of xi (play and performance) and the marvelous theatricality of ju (show or opera), evident in the two Blues dianying, allow for dialogue among a plethora of cultural forms, past and present, foreign and 7. Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, 55, 58. 8. Yeh Yueh-Yu, “Wall to Wall: Music in the Films of Tsui Hark,” in Ho and Ho, The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu, 79.

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indigenous, that range from the filmic to the musical, from the operatic to the vaudevillesque. In doing so, they provide analogues to the historicity of cultural histories that speaks of the melding together of foreign technologies and indigenous art forms, whether traditional (e.g., Peking opera) or hybridized (Shanghai’s modern cabaret revues). This yields dianying, which underscores the historicity of sinicization with respect to the film apparatus on the one hand, and on the other, to its subsequent and eventual mastery by auteurs, metteurs-en-scène and other makers of dianying in China and Hong Kong. The shadowplays of attraction in Peking Opera Blues and Shanghai Blues are played out at two literal and symbolic levels: the respective on-screen stage for enacting Peiping’s Peking opera performances (the xi of xiju) and Shanghai’s modern song and dance revues (the xi of gewu), and the off-stage performative space that extends from the proscenium separating and connecting on-and off-stage actions to the various locations inside and outside an opera theater (Peking Opera Blues), or a revue-cabaret (Shanghai Blues). This combined on-and off-stage staging of narratives and actions, in which on-and off-stage characters may be firmly separated by the proscenium or mingle with each other, either on-or off-stage, gives the films the feel of watching on-screen vaudeville shows. The story of female cabaret performer(s) living in trying times, grappling with love, romance, and other perils of everyday living on-and off-stage, against the backdrop of turbulent times in China, as is the case in Shanghai Blues, recalls equivalent quasi-musical films made in pre-war Shanghai or postwar Hong Kong. Representative examples would include Street Angels (dir. Yuan Muzhi, Mingxing, 1935), The Wild, Wild Rose (dir. Wang Tianlin, MP & GI, 1960), Love Without End (dir. Doe Chin, Shaw Brothers, 1961), Hong Kong Nocturne (dir. Umetsugu Inoue, Shaw Brothers, 1967). Peking Opera Blues, on the other hand, brings on



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the extravaganza of traditional Peking opera and its performativity, while concurrently enthralling the viewers with a melodrama about revolutionary fervor and conflicting loyalties. In Chineselanguage film history, this combination speaks to a different genealogy: a different bricolage of intertextuality, and so evokes such classics as Two Stage Sisters (dir. Xie Jin, Shanghai Film, 1965) of the People’s Republic of China and Vermilion Door (dir. Lo Chen, Shaw Brothers, 1965) of postwar Hong Kong. The particular retrieval of the past to the present in the two Blues dianying, via the modern (e.g., films) and indigenous (e.g., Peking opera), or the hybrid (e.g., cabaret revues in pre-1949 Shanghai), and/or by the multifarious ways afforded by intertextual citations with respect to Chinese-language cinema, imbues the films with their postmodern character. This is most evident not so much in the films’ recycling of past cultural forms such as Chineselanguage movies of yore, than in their capacity to generate repetitions with a difference. Such repetitions produce, and often result, as Jean Baudrillard, might put it, in a parodic assemblage made up of pieces of the past because postmodernism is about “playing with the pieces.”9 This assemblage underscores the uncertainty and contingency of postmodern aesthetics that emerge between the acts or cracks of telling/showing/quoting, and also of remembering the told/shown/quoted. Postmodern aesthetics therefore express: strategies of disruption like self-reflexivity, intertextuality, bricolage, multiplicity, and simulation through parody and pastiche . . . [in which] displacement, fragmentation, inversion of hierarchy, and transgression live together.10

9. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991), 128. 10. Cristina Degli-Esposti, “Postmodernism(s),” in Postmodern in the Cinema, ed. Cristina Degli-Espoti (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 4, 9.

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We might term this, again following Baudrillard, as the simulacrum of simulated language.11

Strategies of Disruption Both films’ playful mixing of time, place, and language assembles parodic pastiches that reveal “postmodernity’s avid disdain for originality (or more accurately, the cult of the original).”12 For example, both films deploy Cantonese for speech and Mandarin for songs scored to the beat of the 1980s variety of Hong Kong’s popular music such as Canto-pop, which simulates the world of contemporary popular music, including Western-style ballad arrangement and instrumentation. This was a fairly standard industrial practice at the time, so the deployment seems innocuous enough. But when viewed in the context of the film’s respective setting in Republican Peiping and the 1930s and 1940s Shanghai, where Canto-pop influenced Mandarin songs and the Cantonese language itself are conceivably not part of the everyday landscape of these two cities, the puzzling assembly of incongruent elements amounts to what can best be described as a simulation of simulacra, of “image[s] without resemblance,”13 and of forms “without the origin.”14 In his study of Hong Kong’s contemporary popular music Lawrence Witzleben

11. Ivy Man, “Three Decades of Canto-pop: Hybridization, Consolidation and Innovation” (2005), http://freemuse.org/archives/1014 (accessed January 4, 2014). 12. Peter Hitchcock, “Niche Cinema; or, Kill Bill with Shaolin Soccer,” in Marchetti and Tan, Hong Kong Film, 219. 13. Constantin V. Boundas, ed., Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 295. 14. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.



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notes that this musical genre is a hybrid which has lost its “original associations.” Witzleben elaborates: Hong Kong’s popular music, like the society in which it has evolved, is a unique and often bewildering mixture of Chinese, other Asian and Western elements . . . [It manifests] local identity as well as one which is inseparably linked to the quite different Chinese societies on the mainland and in Taiwan, to Japan and other parts of Asia, and to North America and Britain . . . [Its] sensibilities and preferences . . . demonstrate continuity with certain aspects of traditional Chinese musical culture. Similarly, from a perspective of acculturation, even in a musical genre which has borrowed heavily from Western and other cultures, the choices made as to which elements to borrow, modify, or reject are also a manifestation of local and national cultural preferences . . . [E] mbedded in many layers of extra-musical associations . . . the original associations are often unknown or irrelevant to [the] listeners.15

Although in Peking Opera Blues characters are seen and heard speaking, albeit briefly, in Mandarin, the speech itself is heavily accented with deliberate mimicry. Such simulation of spoken and sung voices, highlighting spatio-temporal incompatibility with respect to language and songs, all points to a parodic intent that reveals a “contestation of language”16 and a “formal analogue to the dialogue of past and present.”17 From the Sinophone perspective, this enacts “a dynamic of linguistic power struggles” between a 15. Lawrence Witzleben, “Cantopop and Mandapop in Pre-Postcolonial Hong Kong: Identity Negotiation in the Performances of Anita Mui Yim-Fong,” Popular Music 18, no. 2 (May 1999): 241–42. 16. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 61. 17. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 25.

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minoritized language (Cantonese) against the major language of Mandarin that pitches the priorities of cultural China against those of political China.18 The particular contestations enact and circumscribe, as they narrate and perform, the historical-fictional sites that both demarcate and bestride interstitial between-ness: real time and its narration, real space and its fabrication, and facts and their fictionalization. These strategies of disruption discursively circumscribe the incommensurability of the “betweens”: their clarification and confusion. “Facts” (e.g., the actual sociopolitical turbulences that have occurred in historical time) thus vie with “fiction” (e.g., the films’ constructions of corresponding social mayhem in fictive time) and vice versa, producing hyperrealities that seamlessly blend the actual and the staged. In addition to this postmodernist simulation, simulacrum and hyperreality, the films’ play with spoken and sung languages further gives the two Blues dianying a distinctive Sinophone flavor that gestures to the “messy ensemble of heterogeneous formations in China and the Chinese diaspora” and “testifies to the fracturing of China and Chineseness.”19 As Sheldon Lu elaborates: Shijie [the world] or tianxia [all under heaven] is not a monologic world speaking one universal language. The world of Sinophone cinema is a field of multilingual, multi-dialectal articulations that constantly challenge and re-define the boundaries of groups, ethnicities, and national affiliations.20

18. Guilford, “Here’s Why the Name of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Movement’ Is So Subversive?” 19. Sheldon Lu, “Dialect and Modernity in 21st Century Sinophone Cinema,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 49 (Spring 2007), http:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Lu/index.html (accessed December 26, 2013). 20. Ibid.



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The two films’ fabulous and fantastic bricolage of the cinematic, the theatrical, the vaudeville, the dramatic, and the linguistics (Sinitic) is Tsui Hark’s auteurist signature, as is their spectacular blending of the historic and the fictive. They highlight the tactical selection and creative manipulation a Sinophone filmmaker (as Tsui is) makes with regard to cultural traditions, intellectual ideas, filmmaking practices and filmic forms established within and outside Hong Kong. This has entailed astute juggling of “foreign” and “local” cultural capital accrued in and available to the late colonial Hong Kong filmscape. It concurrently points to the complex and contradictory processes vis-à-vis creative symbioses and aesthetic antagonisms, highlighting dynamic synergies between film and other art/cultural forms. Animated with a delirious narrative style, wire-action choreography, and computerized special effects, the postmodern bricolage of cinematic attractions in the two Blues dianying brings novelty to old stories and familiar tunes. The frenzies of hyperreal activities and synergies, especially seen in the final sequences of Shanghai Blues, presents a postmodern bricolage about the affectivity of missed opportunities, as well as of love lost and found. Here, Do-Re-Mi (played by Kenny Bee) chases after Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang), who is on her way to the station to board the Hong Kong-bound train, and in doing so misses out, like all his friends including Stool (Sally Yeh), on the opportunity to celebrate the debut broadcast of the song entitled “Evening Breeze” which he has composed. As Shu-Shu and Do-Re-Mi make their respective ways to the train station through the dazzling lights of Shanghai, closely followed by Stool, who similarly has to beat a path through the crowded streets, the radio broadcasts the song (also the film’s theme song). Against the quick cutting series of images that show various frantic journeys, and also against a backdrop depicting the simulated tumults of a bustling city in chaos, from the tenement where the three friends reside to the station where civilians and soldiers alike jostle to board the train, the song

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floats free of its diegetic source to become a romantic ballad serenading Shanghai at large. The strains of a violin prompt the ballad. Sung in Mandarin,21 and scored to the beats of 1980s Canto-pop with the touches of rhythm and blues, Sally Yeh (the singer who plays Stool and Pat Neil in Shanghai Blues and Peking Opera Blues respectively) croons, via the radio broadcast, for the meeting of two hearts and two dreams. Her tone is both nostalgic (in the sense of looking backward and inward) and hopeful (in the sense of looking forward and outward). As suggested in the lyrics, the transiency of the moment is as fickle as the evening breeze which “loans a bit of time for tight hugs”: In the evening breeze are your dreams and mine The breeze loans a bit of time for tight hugs Hugging on that dream Like a breeze, like a breeze.22

With metaphors of “borrowed time” and “borrowed bridge” highlighting temporal and spatial uncertainties, the song simulates affective anxieties that correspond with the vagaries of romantic encounters and the affairs of the heart, thus: Is the love in my heart the dream of your heart? Can we borrow a bridge to connect intimately? On this borrowed bridge, The I of tomorrow, the you of tomorrow Would the embrace be like that day again? Tonight’s breeze and tomorrow’s dream 21. Sally Yeh also issues a Cantonese version of the song separately. 22. In Chinese the lyrics go like this: 晚風中有你我的夢 風中借來一點時間緊緊擁 擁的那個夢 像一陣風像一陣風



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. . . Is it possible on this night (For) the borrowed time and the borrowed evening breeze To deliver my love into your heart?23

Indeed would “the I of tomorrow” find “the you of tomorrow” on “this night” on a “borrowed bridge”? Would “tonight’s breeze” deliver “tomorrow’s dream” on the drifts of “borrowed time” and “borrowed breeze,” making the “hugs” intimate “like that day”? The song does not answer these questions (though Shu-Shu and Do-Re-Mi eventually meet up and reconcile in the train to the roaring approval of fellow travelers). It expresses romantic yearning. It seeks a union of hearts and also of dreams. It wants a convergence of the novel (“tight hugs”) and the familiar (the idea of a returned embrace in the line “Would the embrace be like that day again?”). It pursues a temporal convergence of the past (“that day”) with the present (“this night”) and the future (e.g., “tomorrow’s dream”), in ephemeral time (“borrowed time”) and place (“borrowed bridge”). This postmodern pastiche of indeterminable temporality, evanescent place, and transient human relationships, thus simulates hyperreal desires that long for a repetition of yesterday as today, today as tomorrow, and permutations thereof. In short, in the world of postmodern ephemerality, nothing, as the song 23. In Chinese the lyrics go like this: 我心的愛是否你心的夢 可否借一條橋讓我倆相通 在這借來的橋中 明天的我明天的你 會不會再像那天相擁 今晚的風和明天的夢 …… 可否這個晚上 借來時間借來晚風 把我的愛送到你心中

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suggests, is ever certain or final. This is also reinforced through the visual dimension of the film: reconciliations between lovers mark the beginning of a journey into the unknown. The happy ending is thus laced with the promises of an uncertain future.

Hyperrealities Entitled It’s Showtime Again, the theme song for Peking Opera Blues, similarly sung in Mandarin and scored to the beat of 1980s Canto-pop, but weaving in Peking opera musical motifs, projects a different kind of hyperreality. It alludes to existentialist angst in a (postmodern) world where the real and the staged have become indistinct: “Look at the world, it’s like a show,” sings Sally Yeh (the singer who plays Pat Neil) adding, a few lines later, cynically, that what you see—the realities/stories about “separations and reunions, sadness and happiness” among “men and women, young or old”—is “just a show.” In the film, the painted face’s roaring bellows—“Ha! Ha! Ha!”—prompt the song, which ends on a lighthearted note thus: Behold with the head raised, have a hearty laugh Look at the world, it’s like a show This act is about fighting at “San Cha Kou” The next act—you and I keep company inside the “Ba Zhen Tu” Originally and eventually: all the acts are about men and women, young and old, separation and reunion, sadness and happiness Sing high sing low, it’s show-time. (Repeat)24 24. In Chinese the lyrics go like this: 抬頭看　樂得笑一番 看世間　戲一般 這場是三岔口上鬥一番



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Invoking “San Cha Kou” and “Ba Zhen Tu” as both sights and sites of show-time acts emphasizes déjà vécu vis-à-vis the familiar, the known, or that which Rey Chow has called the “folk,” which has shored up Chinese discourses of cultural origins.25 The intertextual referencing here draws on tales from China’s distant past that have mythologized legends associated with “San Cha Kou” and “Ba Zhen Tu” as items of cultural significance. Their repeated telling through the ages and in various popular formats that have run the gamut of folklore, operas, and novels and more contemporaneous forms like films, TV shows, and children’s pictorials, and comic books, have made the folktales all too familiar to Chinese households. It naturalizes their mythic origins by inducing cultural identification with a common origin, a common culture, and a common ethnicity but without compulsion because such tales have been thought to have their roots in the folk; as such, they are now part of people’s lives. The resultant “fictive ethnicity” is accordingly imagined as integral to the Chinese nationhood and its ethnicized cultures.26 Though based on historical events such as the warfare and political intrigues of the Three Kingdom (220–280) and Northern Song (960–1127) eras, and legendary figures of those tumultuous periods such as military strategist Zhuge Liang (181–234) as well as General Yang Yanzhao (958–1014) and his wife, Mu Guiying (?), respectively, the accounts are paradoxically largely fictional. That is to say they have coalesced at the narrative sites of historicity and fictionality. Such historical-fictional tales, some dating back more than two thousand 到下一場　八陣圖裡你我同伴 卻原來一切男女老幼離合悲歡 高歌低唱　都是戲一場 (重覆) 25. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 155. 26. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Walterstein, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 96.

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years ago, are akin to Peking Opera Blues to the extent that the film also spins tales that pit the heroic against the villainous within the setting of a particular historical period (early Republican China) with the name of a particular historical figure (Yuan Shikai) giving his face to that era. In this instance, intertextuality helps validate the film as a self-conscious historical fiction, while offering a means for engendering not only simulacra of historical and fictional time, but also that of historical-fictional tales in the reservoir of cultural mythologizing. The film’s theme song, which accompanies the film’s opening and closing credits, invites listeners/viewers to take refuge (“you and I keep company”) in the mythical “Ba Zhen Tu,” or Eight Maze Chart. Designed by Zhu Geliang of the Three Kingdom era and based on the yinyang principles, the Ba Zhen Tu was thought to have supernatural powers with which Zhu decimated his enemies. San Cha Kou is now a well-known Peking opera piece. Most notable for its mime-act of staging a fight in a dark room (on a brightly lit stage), this piece is about the attempted assassination of Jiao Zan at San Cha Kou. Jiao’s posthumous fame related in part to his supposedly close association with General Yang Yanzhao as the latter’s loyal soldier, and also in part to his narrative presence in historical-fictional novels such as the many versions of The Historical Novel of the Yang Family Warriors. In these books, personalities, especially Yan Yanzhao and Mu Guiying, have long been immortalized as heroes of martyrdom for having bravely and selflessly defended Han Chinese against Mongol intruders, and perhaps above all, the treacherous General Pan Renmei (925–991) of the Song court, who helped the aggressors. This family’s legendary battles against the Mongols reportedly entered popular circulation as early as 1015.27 It is a moot point however as to whether Jiao and 27. Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West, The Generals of the Yang Family: Four Early Plays (Hackensack, NJ: World Century, 2013), xii.



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the general had in fact known each other,28 but in Peking Opera Blues, the operatic act of “Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom” features this most famous couple (Scenario 11e).

Circular Narrativity As mentioned earlier, Peking Opera Blues bookends the main story with a painted face (Table 6), seen both at the opening and the closing of the story, and a credits-roll which runs over a montage of images, before and after the story, to the strains of the theme song. This circular mode of narrativity that re-loops the story to the film’s opening also manifests itself in other early Tsui Hark’s films such as Dangerous Encounters—1st Kind and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain; while in The Butterfly Murders and We Are Going to Eat You, the endings are likewise open-ended. The circular and open-ended endings are stylistically similar to the extent that both serve to defer narrative closure. The former offers a narrative structure that symbolically retains viewers in a (perpetual) loop, inviting them to review the story as having a metafictional quality. As in the particular case of Shanghai Blues and Peking Opera Blues, the montage composed of snippets or highlights from the story over which the closing credits run additionally help serve as a pithy reminder of that which has transpired. Shanghai Blues further infers repetition (with a difference) through the return of a “double” that reinforces the story’s circularity. After bidding farewell to Shu-Shu and Do-Re-Mi at the train station, Stool sees her “double” (also played by Sally Yeh) in the streets of Shanghai. She is an exact replica of Stool, the naïve country girl who first arrived in the city at the beginning of the film—right down to the brownchecked cheongsam, the black round-rimmed glasses, and the box 28. Baidu Encyclopedia, “Jiao Zan,” http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E7%84% A6%E8%B5%9E&prd=button_doc_jinru (accessed January 4, 2014).

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suitcase. The open-ended ending in The Butterfly Murders and We Are Going to Eat You similarly postpones narrative closure because the protagonists, after respectively surviving the horrors of war-like feuds and of cannibalism, find themselves on the road again with an uncertain future ahead. Displacement, dislocation and home seeking consequent to turbulent times are recurrent themes in Butterflies, Eat, Dangerous and Zu, where, as I conclude elsewhere: [The] lack of a firm closure analogizes the endless search for home among deterritorialized Chinese diasporans [such as Tsui Hark] on the one hand, and on the other, their ambivalence in regards to the matter of home and belonging since the wish to go/come home is simultaneous with an overwhelming sense of futility.29

Peking Opera Blues also ends with a similar feeling of futility in the sense that despite Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi’s successes, they could not turn around historical events that led to the Republican failure to establish a democratic home(land) in post-imperial China. The distinct lack of a firm closure in this and Tsui’s other early films also helps align them with postmodern aesthetics disdainful of the certainty of closure, so crumbling the modernist faith in dichotomies that portray structural matter in distinct and essentialist terms: open versus close; beginning versus ending; or in the case of Bordwell and Thompson’s formalism, plot versus story. This ambivalence is well expressed in the repeated use of the painted face, at the beginning and end of the film. The particular literalization of such a repetition with a difference (the same face now has historical insights) parallels the modifications in the opening and closing credits rolls. In the opening credits there is a montage showing an array of Peking opera props such as headgear, weapons, and beards. At the close the montage not only culls highlights from the main story, but also contains cut-offs such as the extra showing 29. Tan, “Surfing with the Surreal in Tsui Hark’s Wave,” 33–50.



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Pat Neil executing some very impressive kung fu movements. The robust actions and movements in the culled highlights serve as a visual contrastive, in strikingly dissimilar configurations, to the still shots of the “lifeless” props in the opening montage. Thus, like the painted face, they discursively circumscribe the postmodern repetition with a difference. In Peking opera, this unnamed painted face would be an army-general (Table 6). His striking facial makeup reveals multiple personality traits. On his forehead are three diagonally drawn silkworm-like stripes (red and white) and two small circles (red and white). This renders the otherwise symmetrical makeup asymmetrical, suggesting that he is a crook, villain and an outlaw. He has a long flowing black beard. This means he is middle-aged, and possibly impetuous, as opposed to the elderly who would typically wear a long flowing white beard that connotes respectability and sagacity. He is probably human since male immortals such as deities, goblins, spirits and ghosts would don a beard that is yellow, green, red or gold in color, such as the other three painted faces seen in the opening credits montage. His face is black, signaling his bad-tempered nature. On his chin is a cup-shaped blue patch with a white outline around it. His lips are white in color, while blue and white streaks trace the contours of his cheeks, eye sockets and eyebrows which then curve upwards in an exaggerated fashion. On his nose is an inverted laughing mask. Finally, two drooping red lines on the wide side of his philtrum complete the striking makeup. This palette of assorted colors and variegated designs thus constructs the general’s personality, though visibly multiple, as ultimately ambivalent: red for righteousness and honesty; white for treachery, craftiness and deceptiveness; blue for wildness and unruliness; and black for brusqueness and gruffness. The ambivalence in his makeup thus matches what is heard in his bellow: are they celebratory, mocking, or both?

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Narratively symbolizing an omniscient figure the painted face fulfills his narrative function by giving a face to the jiegu fengjin critic who, among other things, has access to historical hindsight for mediating between lessons of history and present contemplation. As mentioned before, his parodic return provides the Janus archway for constructing the historical passage that links the idealism of Chinese Republicanism and the promises of the Joint Declaration for the jiegu fengjin evaluation.

Peking Opera But Tsui Hark’s parodic invocation of Peking opera in this film does not start and end with the painted face. To better understand his playful citations vis-à-vis traditional Peking opera, it is necessary to delve into the cache of stock characters in this opera form. The painted face, as in the case of the titular daomadan, is a stock figure of traditional Peking opera. The painted face is a jing who usually plays a military general, court official or other highly placed personality, and wears a long beard: black for the middle-aged and white for the elderly. The daomadan, on the other hand, belongs to dan (female) role-types; like the jing she is a martial (wu) character, hence a warrior. The jing and the dan are two of the four main roletypes, the other two being the sheng (male) and the chou (clown), who may be male or female. An old man is called a laosheng, while his younger counterpart is a xiaosheng. Of these role-types, the jing has the most elaborate facial makeup. As such he is also known as the hualian, or flower face. In stark contrast to the jing, the sheng and dan usually sport a pinkish foundation, with graduating hues of rouge around the eyes and the cheeks (e.g., Shots 11D, 14A, and 17C). The facial makeup for the chou has significantly less rouge, and so is paler by comparison. Chou characters are usually crafty, and as such typically have a white blemish on or over the nose. They sometimes have white color around the eyes as well. Here, the



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overriding principle is that the more white color they have on the face, the more sly they are. Characters, whatever their role-type, may be either human or non-human. They may also appear in wuxi and wenxi, or military (wu) and civil and literary (wen) plays (xi) respectively, which are the primary genres of this opera form. In wuxi, battle scenes and acrobatic stunts dominate, while scenarios of singing, together with plots about love and romance, preponderate in the wenxi. The daomadan may or may not be the zhengdan, or main protagonist. But as a warrior, she (dan) would be adept in displaying martial skills like riding a horse (ma) or wielding a sabre (dao). In Peking Opera Blues, Mu Guiying, who battles her identical double on stage, would be a daomadan prototype, as is Fa Gum-Sao’s role as a royal concubine. The sabre-and-steed woman would sing in falsetto. She would brandish a dao or equivalent weapons such as sword and spear. She would perform acrobatic movements. She would, as in the case of the two Mu Guiyings, be capable of executing a split, which in Chinese is known as “yizima.” It is so-called because the posture requires the performers to stretch their legs outwards and horizontally like the Chinese character for the numeral one (“yizi”) while the “ma” simply means a particular type of (operatic) posture. Depending on the performance, this “ma” can symbolically be taken for a horse, or a corporeal fusion of the horse/ performer herself. Finally, the sabre-and-steed woman warrior is distinct from the wudan. Both are female fighters, but the wudan is a commoner with martial skills; she may also be a bandit or a spirit. The daomadan, on the other hand, is a human figure and has a higher social standing such as a general or a royal warrior. Non-military women are known as wendan. In traditional Peking opera there are five categories: laodan, qingyi, guimendan, huadan, and caidan. Laodan are elderly women. The qingyi is usually a poor, married commoner and is so-called because she would don qingyi (literally meaning green or dark-colored clothes)

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which symbolize her social status. Guimendan characters, on the other hand, are well-to-do ladies. But like the qingyi, the guimendan would gesture delicately and move about gracefully in ways that signal their good upbringing and fine stature. Finally, huadan (literally meaning flower girls) are young, vivacious and shrewd maids, whereas caidan, or colorful females, are comic (chou) figures, given to exaggerated sniggering and acting. Put contextually, Chun Pui’s (a.k.a. Paul) Fa Gum-Sao character specializes in the daomadan role. He appears as one in the “Tyrant-king Bids Farewell to Concubine” act, playing the concubine (Scenario 5d). Wielding a sword, he flirts with the (male) audience who roars with approval. His performance catches the attention of Commander Lei, who then toys with the idea of taking Fa as his xianggong (male lover or husband). Lei’s subsequent move to enforce the proposal of marriage against Fa’s will is anticipated in the joke, overheard in the backstage in the preceding scene, that the act in which Fa plays the concubine be called “The tyrant-king mounts the bow and does so with brutal force” (bawang ying shang gong). The expression “ying shang gong” is a euphemism for rape, with “ying” (brutal force) serving as an adverb that modifies the verb phrase “shang gong” (to mount a bow). When Lei comes to the theater the next time, he bears lavish gifts for Fa. Misinterpreting the act as a fan’s expression of admiration and adoration, Fa is initially flattered but recoils in horror upon realizing Lei’s real intention. He immediately rejects the marriage proposal. So Lei’s men torture him with an opera prop, a thumbscrew-like device made of bamboo. Boss Wong intervenes and accepts the marriage proposal on Fa’s behalf. Pat Neil subsequently helps Fa escape. As a result she has the opportunity to make her stage debut. Disguised as Fa, she then plays the titular daomadan in “Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom.” In this act, the male warrior, though unnamed, would be General Yang Yanzhao of the famous Yang Family; that is, Mu’s husband-to-be or the groom Mu seeks.



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The above two opera acts are standard fare in Peking opera, as are the other two acts in film, namely, “The Legend of Madam White Snake”30 and “The Eight Deities Cross the Sea” (Scenarios 16c and 28b, respectively). All four acts belong to the wuxi genre. They are adapted from well-known folk stories. The first two are based on stories of historical figures: Xiang Yu (232 BC–202 BC) of the late Qin dynasty is the bawang (tyrant-king) mentioned in the title of Fa’s act (who sits regally and quietly on stage watching Fa’s sword dance); and Mu Guiying and Yang Yanzhao who, as discussed above, are a famous patriotic couple from the Northern Song era. The other two acts are based on mythical figures. The legend of Madam White Snake tells the tragic love story between a snake spirit and her mortal husband. In the film, viewers briefly see an excerpt featuring Sheung Hung as Madam White Snake (a wudan figure) fighting Pat Neil’s wusheng character (a male heavenly guard). Finally, “The Eight Deities Cross the Sea” myth is about eight prisoners (one female and seven male), also of the Northern Song period, who successfully escaped from an island-prison by using a log to float out to the mainland. As the legend goes, there were fifty or so escapees in the breakout. All except eight perished in the water. The survivors relied on their martial arts skills to stay alive. Subsequently deified as immortals (in folklore), they are accordingly revered and worshipped to this day.31

Action Off In Peking Opera Blues all four acts are narrative pivots for offstage actions. Fa’s on-stage teases, as mentioned, have led to an off-stage marriage proposal (Scenarios 5c and 11a). While watching 30. The title of this act is listed on the theater billboard. 31. Baike Encyclopedia, “Eight Deities Cross the Sea” [Ba xian guo hai], http:// baike.baidu.com/subview/25109/8992835.htm (accessed January 4, 2014).

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the “Mu Guiying” act, Warlord Tsao finds himself attracted to two daomadan on stage, Mu Guiying (Pat Neil) and her double (Sheung Hung), wishing that they are biologically female (Scenario 11e). When he later finds out that the two are in fact female, he requests a special performance. After watching the “Madam White Snake” act, he invites them home for a night-cap (Scenarios 16c and 16d). Pat Neil is reluctant. So she turns to her father for help. Her father expresses resignation, saying: “This is what happens when women appear on stage. If you turn down the invitation, the warlord would shut down the theater.” Sheung Hung, on the other hand, gladly accepts the invitation for she has agreed to the fee to be a sex bait in Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi’s new scheme to steal the key to the safe. The two women thus go to the warlord’s mansion (Scenarios 17a and 17b). Finally, the “Eight Deities” act eventually becomes a dramatic foil for staging Tsao Wan, Bei Hai, Sheung Hung, Pat Neil and Tung Man’s spectacular escape from Commander Lei’s dragnet at the theater, via the rooftop (Scenario 28b). In opera parlance, Warlord Tsao, Warlord Tun, and Commander Lei would be the equivalent of jing characters. In the film, painted faces would appear on stage (as in the case of the bawang in Fa’s act), or mill about backstage as human props—much like the rouged actors who surround Fa in Shot 14A. (These actors are not jing figures.) Peking Opera Blues is not an opera film, so it would be odd for the three high-ranking officials to wear the flower face of jing characters. Instead of elaborate makeup, the makeup and costume designer creates a different type of moustache for each of them that reflects their respective social standing or station, and in the case of the two warlords, bushy eyebrows and slickly combed hair, while the commander dons a black-rimmed hat and a furlined collar which in turn distinguishes him from his subordinates. Thus Warlord Tsao has a large bushy white “imperial” moustache, while Warlord Tun sports a black handlebar moustache, with Commander Lei’s black “Mexican” moustache being the smallest



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of the three types. Comparatively speaking, based on the moustaches alone, one could surmise that Warlord Tsao would be the eldest, and as such, the wisest, the most worldly, the most able and the least impetuous and naïve. Lei reveals the last trait when he expresses shock and horror that Warlord Tsao had shot at Pak-Hoi and Tung Man and had done so with total disregard for Lei’s safety (Scenario 11h). All these three jing characters are constructed as licentious figures. Tsao needs female companionship every night, while Tun has twenty-eight wives and is always on the look out for more. Commander Lei, on the other hand, has a soft spot for xianggong. Sartorial signifiers further distinguish him from the two warlords, who would typically don colorful and highly ornate military uniform, whereas Lei mostly wears black which, according to Peking opera conventions, would define him as an unscrupulous villain of the highest order. Off-stage, Pat Neil would come close to a guimendan but with a difference: she is somewhat hotheaded, lacking finesse, and as such has the characteristics of a huadan as well which the coquettish and materialistic Sheung Hung is. Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi, on the other hand, are the modern-day daomadan and wusheng, respectively. They are therefore upright and valiant—as revolutionary warriors, ought to be. They demonstrate their political commitment to the Republican cause by appearing in a Zhongshan suit. Although such a suit is an item in Tung Man’s choice of everyday apparel, he is politically ambivalent like Sheung Hung and Pat Neil, both of whom become entwined in Tsao Wan and Pak-Hoi’s revolutionary endeavors. Tung Mang is a xiaosheng, while Manager Sung and Pat Neil’s father are laosheng. The father is slightly older than the smooth-faced manager. His pencil moustache signals this. Finally, the unnamed officer with a “Dali” moustache and the anonymous soldier with a dot-size moustache are chou characters, therefore given to clowning or exaggerated acting.

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Although by no means exhaustive, this listing shows the extent to which Peking Opera Blues is indebted to traditional Peking opera in terms of role-types, makeup and dress codes. Viewers familiar with Peking opera conventions and repertoires would not only have a field day decoding the film’s color palette, makeup styles, and sartorial codings as discussed above, but would also understand the range of Tsui’s parodic, even comical, citations with respect to Peking opera. The film not so much portrays Peking opera as imitates and appropriates its form, creating copies to the “original” referents. Finally, the usual boundary of the proscenium arch has not prevented Tsui Hark from staging action that breaks its authority as the bar separating performers and viewers. Such Brechtian techniques show Tsui’s capacity for cultural anarchy, shoring up his reputation as an auteur with guicai, or devilish talent who can coax surprises, sometimes in extraordinary ways, out of the most humdrum. As a result, the “Mu Guiying” and “Eight Deities” acts, though already spectacular in their own right, are no match for the hyperreal spectacles that Tsui shrouds them with. He restages the former into a hysterical comedy of confused identities, while reconfiguring the latter as an awesome piece of stunt work in which the performers make their stage exit not via the stage doors, but by swinging with a piece of brilliant-blue cloth, to the hail of bullets, from the ceiling beams over the stage to the rooftop on the other side of the auditorium. The survivors and their pursuers then enact an amazing chase across the snow-covered roof, topped off with a gun fight in slow motion.

Meta-cinema By incorporating the filmic, the operatic and the acrobatic, the hyperreal staging and restaging of the four classic opera acts yields meta-cinematic structures in which displacement, fragmentation,



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inversion of hierarchy, and transgression live together. The resultant aural and visual excessiveness in turn calls into question illusions of fixed systems of representation. This breaks down the sanctity of the proscenium arch inside the Kwok Wo Theatre, wreaking havoc on a spatial divider for segregating viewers (as the observers) from performers (as the observed). The fragmentation of the proscenium in multiple ways frees it from its prescribed function as a barrier, as a boundary marker, rendering it malleable and mobile; to the extent that the proscenium in the theater, as the following example shows, is tweaked, or reshaped, reassembled as the four edges of the screen, providing a visual frame for the on-screen enactment of an off-stage opera about female bonding that unfolds in the street fronting the Kwok Wo Theatre (Scenario 12, or see Table 7a): Table 7a: Hyperrealities: in front of Kwok Wo Theatre (Scenario 12) A

17

18

19

20

B

C

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Table 7b: The sequence in front of Kwok Wo Theatre (Scenario 12) Shot 17A (00:52:46)

Under a street lamp, Pat Neil sobs. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 17B (00:53:00)

Tsao Wan consoles Pat Neil, saying: “Your performance was fantastic!” (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 17C (00:53:10)

Tsao Wan grabs Pat Neil’s shoulder and Real-time motion says, “Did you not hear the audience clapping and cheering just now?” (Mobile shot)

Shot 18A (00:53:22)

The two girls look skyward. Snow starts to fall, prompting the “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” song. (Stationary shot)

Slow motion

Shot 18B (00:53:29)

They see a party across the street. (Mobile shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 18C (00:53:40)

Pat Neil and Tsao Wan laugh heartily. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 19A (00:53:45)

Bouncers throw Sheung Hung into the street. The red boards with white characters contain announcements of the theater’s offerings. The hanging red banner on the top right corner bears the name of Fa Gum-Sao. (Stationary shot; Tsao Wan’s and Pat Neil’s point of view)

Real-time motion

Shot 19B (00:53:49)

Sheung Hong shivers in the cold. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 19C (00:53:53)

Sheung Hong stands up, complaining noisily about the cold. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 20A (00:53:55)

Tsao Wan and Pat Neil laugh even more heartily. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion

Shot 20B (00:54:01)

Tsao Wan, Pat Neil, and Sheung Hung walk down the street together. (Stationary shot)

Real-time motion



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The collapse of the operatic and the filmic, in the above scene, yields a filmic narrative within an opera-esque setting as well as a backstage opera within the film proper. This offers the pleasure of experiencing a “shadowplay of attractions” which is simultaneously a film and a dianying (electric shadowplay). The shadowplay in this instance begins with an opera-esque take of Pat Neil sobbing silently under a lamp post. In Take 17A, the extreme long shot composition frames and simulates an opera setting for dramatizing the despondency of a lonesome girl, dressed in opera underclothes and sporting opera makeup, bowing with grief in an empty street; that, together with her long mane swaying in the wind, amplifies despair. This opera-esque hyperreality is reinforced in Takes 19A and 19C (which show bouncers throwing Sheung Hung into the street who then stands in front of the theater alone, complaining about the cold). Secondly, the framing and composition of these three takes both mimic and match the typical point-of-view of opera patrons at a theater. They are quite unlike the other shots used in this sequence: Shots 17B and 17C (which show Tsao Wan consoling Pat Neil); Shot 18A (which shows the two girls watching the snow falling); Shots 18C and 20A (which show them laughing heartily together); Shot 19B (which depicts Sheung Hung rubbing her arms to keep warm); and Shots 18B and 20B (which respectively frame a low-angle shot of the party in the upper level of a house, and a high-angle shot of Tsao Wan, Pat Neil and Sheung Wan walking down the street together, cuddled under the warmth of an overcoat). The various perspectives on the scene offered by the latter group of takes—whether via the medium shot (Takes 17B, 17C, 18A, 18C, 19B, and 20A); the mobile shot (Shots 17C and 18B); the tilt-up shot (Shot 18B); the aerial shot (Shot 20B); or the slow motion effect (Shot 18A)—are intrinsically filmic. They do not correspond with, and are outside, the viewing range of the average opera-goer— unlike Take 17A, or for that matter, Takes 19A and 19C as well which similarly use the extreme long (opera-esques) compositional frame

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but this time to show, respectively, bouncers throwing Sheung Hung out of the theater, and her complaining about the cold afterwards. Like Pat Neil, she too wears opera makeup and underclothes that, as discussed earlier in relation to Shots 15A and 15B, recall Peking opera’s performance conventions for depicting a person’s fall from grace. The two girls are now a pitiful sight; a poor reflection of the regal female warrior just portrayed in“Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom” act (Scenario 11e), where Pat Neil played the “real” Mu (Shot 11D), in place of Fa Gum-Sao, and with Sheung Hung as the “fake double” (Shot 12A)., The red banner bearing Fa Gum-Sao’s name (Shots 19A and 19C) offers an intratextual reference to and also a pithy reminder of Fa’s sad fate when he refuses Commander Lei’s proposal of marriage. Fa’s physical absence, together with the use of sartorial conventions in Peking opera, the construction of opera-esques setting and scenario, and the announcements of the theater’s Peking opera offerings on the wall (Shots 19A to 19C), helps reinscribe the operatic to, as they meld it with, the diegetic world in the film’s shadowplay of attractions. Misery brings the three women together. Tsao Wan’s second attempt to steal the key has failed. Pat Neil has made her stage debut but her father was not impressed: rather than showing appreciation and support, he humiliated her by chasing her with a long stick around the stage. As for Sheung Hung, she has found the box in which she had put the jewelry but to her despair, the jewelry was no longer there. Despite their disappointment, the three learn to laugh in the face of misery and form a friendship based on mutual suffering and understanding that augment female bonding. This aspect of the narration which is simultaneously operatic and filmic, together with the combined use of opera-esque and filmic compositions, the fragmented use of slow motion that prompts a Cantopop Mandarin song (heard in the soundtrack), and the hyperreal transformation of the song into an opera-esque aria, underscores:



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postmodernism’s preoccupation with the signifier rather than the signified, with participation, performance, and happening rather with an authoritative and finished art object, with surface appearances rather than [deep] roots.32

But there are other genres at play and work in Peking Opera Blues, not least of which, as I explore in the next chapter, Act 5, is the intertextual relationship of the “three-women” films and their underlying motivation from mandarin ducks and butterflies fiction with the Tsui Hark film, both of which the film cites and parodies, and to which I now turn.

32. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 53.

Act 5

Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Revolution of the Heart There is a Chinese joke: in any gathering of three women, drama is bound to happen (san ge nüren yi tai xi; which literally would translate as “three women, one show-time”). This is certainly true for Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues, redolent, as it is, of what might be called the “three-women” films in Chinese-language cinema. This subgenre of melodrama was triggered by filmic adaptations of “mandarin duck and butterfly” literature (yuanyang hudie literature), featuring three female protagonists, first in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong in the 1930s. Best known for its sentimental stories about unfulfilled love, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction first appeared during the first decade of the twentieth century, and for the next two or so decades, remained “extremely popular,” especially among urban readers.1 It took the form of novels, short stories, and serializations in newspapers, weeklies, and other 1. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 36.



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popular magazines, while “multimedia translation into movies, comic strips, stage plays, and even scripts for traditional-style drum singing” boosted the genre’s popularity further.2 This “middlebrow” body of literature which offered a “fiction of comfort” came under sustained attack by the May Fourth Movement literati after 1919, for its presumed stoic adherence to Confucian codes of mores and ethics.3 As this movement gathered momentum and secured its authority as a prime mover in national events, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction was eventually consigned to the margins, even the dustbins, of modern Chinese literature.4 My specific interest here, though, is not so much the genre’s literary development or cinematic translation, but as part of a genealogical trace, traversing what Michel Foucault would consider as the “field of entangled and confused parchments” that falls outside the domains of dominant historiography, or in “what we tend to feel is without history,”5 on the “three-women” films in Chineselanguage cinema from the 1930s onwards. This approach, which by definition would reject linear narrative, “genealogizes” Peking Opera Blues accordingly. Equally crucially, it maps the film’s interfaces with that which Haiyan Lee has called a “revolution of the heart” in Chinese(-language) fiction, in which she identifies three structures of feelings: the Confucian, the enlightened and the 2. Ibid., 38. 3. George Kao, “Editor’s Page,” Renditions 17/18 (1982), unpaginated; Sally Borthwick, trans., “Fate in Tears and Laughter,” in Chinese Middlebrow Fiction from the Ch’ing Dynasty and Early Republican Eras, ed. Liu Ts’unyan (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984), 255–87; and E. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 20. 4. Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity, 33–37. 5. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1999), 372.

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revolutionary. The structure of feelings, Lee postulates, following Raymond Williams (1977): captures social consciousness as lived experience in process, or in solution, before it is “precipitated” and given fixed forms. Feeling here is not opposed to thought, but “thought as felt and feeling as thought.” A structure of feeling refers to a “particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.6

For Lee, the Confucian, enlightenment, and revolutionary structures of feelings chart the topology of social values and practices that not only have evolved and shifted with particular epochal and societal changes in modern China; but they also mapped ruptures in, and collaboration with, existing ideologies. This topology marks “broad paradigmatic shifts . . . [in] the Chinese conceptions of love . . . as a deeply historical product of colonial modernity marked by cross-hybridization, displacement, contestation, and repression.”7 The shifts call into question rigid and canonical schemes of periodization, and unsettle the myth of origin and master narratives stemming from, for example, “Chinese/Western or native/foreign debates about romantic love.”8 Lee thus concludes that the discourse of love in Chinese fiction is “neither wholly imported nor wholly indigenous, but rather a hybrid signifier that [has come] to play a significant role in the topography of emotions.”9 6. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love and in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133. 7. Ibid., 16. 8. Ibid., 9, 10. 9. Ibid., 10.



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Although Lee primarily analyzes modern Chinese literature from 1900 to 1950, her theorization of the revolution of the heart with respect to the Confucian, enlightenment, and revolutionary structures of feelings, that give the sense of a particular generation or of a particular period, has purchase for film studies.10 With particular regard to Peking Opera Blues, I argue that the film manifests a postmodern structure of feelings, already foreshadowed in my discussion, for example, of the songs in this film/dianying (shadowplay) and Shanghai Blues above, that speak to the aforesaid three structures in various and intertextual ways.

“Reading by Way of Woman” The account here primarily looks at Peking Opera Blues and earlier three-women films such as Three Modern Girls (dir. Bu Wancang, 1933), Sun Moon Star (dir. Yi Wen, 1960),11 and spin-offs from the Tixiao yinyuan (Fate in tears and laughters) phenomenon with a particular focus on the two-part Story of the Three Loves (also known in Chinese as Tixiao yinyuan, dir. Wang Tianlin, 1963). Three Modern Girls was produced in prewar Shanghai by Lian Hua; Hong Kong’s Motion Picture and General Investment (MP & GI) made the last two films in postwar Hong Kong. Lian Hua and MP & GI were major film companies of their respective time and place. A caveat: not all films discussed in the chapter are available for close viewing and analysis. In cases where film prints either no longer exist or are not in circulation in the digital formats, the reconstruction is largely reliant on printed and electronic material in the archive. Such films include Three Modern Girls, the two Shanghai productions of Tixiao yinyuan (1932 and 1940) and the 10. Ibid. 11. The English translation title for this film gives the celestial elements in the film’s Chinese title in the reverse order.

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remake by Hong Kong’s Yin Cheng (1952), and the three film adaptations of Xu Zhenya’s Jade Pear Spirit (1924, 1939, and 1953). My construction of the three-women film genealogy integrates Rey Chow’s notion of “reading by way of woman.”12 Chow’s woman(ist) approach interrogates the historical marginalization of Chinese women “under the ‘larger’ headings of history, society, tradition” and “‘bigger’ concerns such as reform and revolution.”13 It emphasizes the idea of women as “narrative images” that highlight the primacy of female subjectivities.14 This kind of reading entails a rethinking of practices in cultural criticism that have “performed” totalizing “truths” as time-honored norms.15 The rethinking would open up new areas of investigation that highlight conditions of possibilities, offering a critique of the present that uncovers and problematizes the relationship between knowledge, power, and subjectivity.16 Like Lee, Chow’s work takes the mandarin duck and butterfly literature as its starting point. Mandarin duck and butterfly fiction typically carries sentimental love stories about unfulfilled romantic desires: sorrowful love (aiqing), bitter love (kuqing), miserable love 12. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 50–56. 13. Ibid., 52. 14. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 144. 15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 16. Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, “The Foucauldian Framework,” in Qualitative Research Practice, eds. Clive Seale, David Silverman, Jaber Gurbrium, and Giampietro Gobo (London: Sage, 2003), 129–38; Maria Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 7–21; and Maria Tamboukou and Stephen Ball, “Genealogy and Ethnography: Fruitful Encounters or Dangerous Liaisons?” in Dangerous Encounters: Genealogy and Ethnography, eds. Maria Tamboukou and Stephen Ball (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 1–10.



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(canqing), wronged love (yuanqing), and chaste love (lieqing).17 Emerging during the final years of the Qing dynasty, its literary version, initially and primarily taking the form of novels, quickly found popular reception in urban locations, or newly modernizing Chinese cities. Their subsequent translation into other media or popular culture mediums correspondingly helped garner an even larger and wider following in China and also in the Chinese diaspora, creating “waves” in the cultural scene that lasted well into the 1930s.18 Its residual influence in cultural reproduction in Chinese societies, in the forms of literature, film, drama, opera, and songs, including pottery and poetries, remains evident up to the present day. Xu Zhenya’s Jade Pear Spirit, the bestseller of 1912, was the first to be called mandarin duck and butterfly literature. Written in classical prose, it is, as Rey Chow elaborates: .

strewn with sentimental poems in which lovers are compared to mandarin ducks and butterflies. A related series of jokes and 17. Paired mandarin ducks and butterflies are traditional symbols of eternal love and undying devotion. 18. According to Perry Link, there were three discernible waves. This first coincided with the rise of Chinese Republicanism in late Qing China. The genre primarily composed of love stories (aiqing xiaoshuo) about the tragedies of Confucian strictures on the affairs of the heart. The second major wave occurred during the rise of warlordism. Disenchantment with the Republican revolution led to satirical “social” novels (shehui xiaoshuo), Western-style detective stories (xishi zhentan xiaoshuo) about crime and punishment, and “scandal” fiction (heimu xiaoshuo) about moral decay and corruption behind “dark curtains” (heimu). Emerging in the mid-1920s, the third wave consisted of warrior-errant fantasies (wuxia xiaoshuo) which were generally anti-warlordism in sentiment. E. Perry Link, “Traditional-Style Popular Urban Fiction in the Teens and Twenties,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), 332–33.

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rumours among some writers of the period resulted in the use of “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” as a pejorative label for the authors of this type of sentimental love story . . . During the twenties, as the May Fourth Movement gathered momentum, the label “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” was used generally to attack all types of old-style fiction that continued to enjoy popularity.19

More particularly, May Fourth literati were disdainful of fiction that deployed the classical language of the scholar-official class. They favored the vernacular baihua instead. Proffered as the speech of the common people, it was thought to speak the voices of the proletariat in the most authentic way. They also condemned fiction writers who “blindly [follow] either of two undesirable principles, namely wenyi zhi dao (literature as the embodiment of dao for moral instructions), and youxi (literature as ‘play’ or ‘amusement’).”20 As Zheng Zhenduo, an important May Fourth figure, wrote in 1922: Neither group knows what literature really is . . . Literature is the pouring of human emotions into words. It is reflection of human life that occurs naturally . . . The writer writes for nothing; the reader reads for nothing. To be more clear, literature is literature; it is not written nor read for amusement, propaganda, or didacticism. The writer is only writing naturally about his observation, feelings, and emotions; the reader is naturally assimilated and moved. We need not and cannot deliberately spread any lessons through literature. We especially cannot deliberately pretend to amuse readers.21

Mandarin duck and butterfly fiction is guilty of all the above charges since its writers generally preferred to write in classical prose about the dao, and most especially, they wrote for amusement. 19. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 36. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Cited in ibid., 42.



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Mandarin duck and butterfly fiction’s characteristic Confucian structure of feelings, deriving from Confucian teachings about li (rites or propriety), yi (righteousness), zhong (loyalty), and xiao (filial piety), did not sit well with the political agendas of the May Fourth Movement either.22 Its particular adherence to Confucianism was thought to be feudalistic, and therefore “old school” and “out-of-date” for New China. Its sentimental frivolity was similarly despised as escapist, and therefore politically irrelevant and lacking in social significance. The movement which emerged in 1919 ran instead with what Haiyan Lee has called the enlightenment structure of feeling. Construed as progressive, this enlightenment structure: [pursued] a radical epistemic break with the Confucian structure, and [rejected] Confucian values in favor of an expressivist or physicalist understanding of emotion and other universalizing norms of enlightenment humanism, and nationalism.23

This translated into a demand for replacing the classical mode of writing and expression with the vernacular baihua. The enlightenment structure additionally struck at the authoritative Confucian family system that oppressed women and subjugated individual freedom and autonomy. “Free love” (ziyou lian’ai), or the freedom to choose one’s romantic and sexual partner, including spouse, became a symbol of self-determination and gender equality. In practice it sought freedom from state regulation and familial interference in personal relationships, and took the Confucian feudalist practice of arranged marriage, polygamous households, and other constraints, including the proscription against widows remarrying, as its antithesis.24 Pushed to the limit, ziyou lian’ai seeds democ22. Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 15. 23. Ibid., 15–16. 24. Ibid., 5.

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racy, since the heart of this practice contains the spirit of self-will and self-determination which gives rise to democratic practices based on free choice.

The Fiction of Comfort—Filmed In the 1920s, film industries started to appear in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the May Fourth Movement’s rise to prominence coincided with their development. Scoffed at by the May Fourth elites, but immensely popular with the reading public, mandarin duck and butterfly literature reached an even greater mass culture market when filmmakers (among others) tapped into its reservoir of “ready-made stories.”25 Xu’s Jade Pear Spirit, for example, was the subject of at least three film adaptations. The first was a silent movie, produced by Mingxing Film Studio of Shanghai (co-dir. Zhang Shichuan and Xu Hu, 1924); the other two were Cantonese black-and-white talkies made in Hong Kong by Da Guan Film Studio (co-dir. Shi Youyu and Li Lianqia, 1939), and Yong Feng Studio (dir. Li Chenfeng, 1953). Based on their respective synopses given in Encyclopedia of Chinese Films (1999) and Hong Kong Filmography (1997), it would seem that the three films (like the novel) similarly manifest the Confucian structure of feelings characterized by virtuous sentiments that emphasize familial duties over romantic love. They also follow the narrative trajectory of the main plot in the novel: the tragic love between schoolteacher He Mengxia and widow Bai Liniang. As in the novel, Bai Liniang dies. In the case of the 1939 Hong Kong production, it is however not clear if Mengxia’s death as a “martyr of love” occurs in the battlefield (as in 25. Zhen Zhang, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage: ‘Laborer’s Love’ and the Question of Early Cinema,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 36–37.



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the novel).26 Unexpectedly, the Shanghai production has a happy ending. It extends the subplot of the difficult relationship between Mengxia and Cui Yunqian, Bai Liniang’s sister-in-law. They eventually reconcile at a military hospital where Mengxia recuperates from a battle wound. In memory of the late widow, the two agree to raise her son, and thereafter live in conjugal bliss, heart-to-heart (xin xin xiangyin).27 In her rereading of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, Rey Chow takes to task the May Fourth Movement literati, for taking the narrow view of “literature is literature” that contributed to the movement’s incessant obsession for the “ideal of literature as a new agent of social change”—vis-à-vis Confucianism in particular—and its correspondent “functionalist role of ‘serving’ society.”28 This consigned the genre to the abysses of modern Chinese literary history, thereby ignoring its narrative capacity to “parody” the feudalist ideologies it cites, and correspondingly to “[feminize] . . . Confucian culture through storytelling.”29 While appreciative of the efforts by sociologists and literary historians working outside mainland China in the early 1980s to restore what has become canonically obscure, Chow remains sharply critical. For her, the literary approach (here exemplified through a particular case study of a 1982 Renditions collection of essays) has variously sought to ease the genre into the grand narrative of continuity that connects with “traditions” of Chinese literature, “[dating] back to the Tang Dynasty,” and to flush out, retroactively, “outstanding” works based on the “social Darwinist rhetoric of 26. Mary Wong, ed., Hong Kong Filmography, 1913–1941, Vol. 1 (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997), 365. 27. Zhu Tianwei and Wang Zhenzhen, Encyclopedia of Chinese Films [Zhongguo dianying dadian: Gushipian, xiqupian], 1905–1930 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 26–27. 28. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 42, 53. 29. Ibid., 54–55.

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eugenics.”30 Taking Perry Link’s 1981 book as representative of the sociological approach, she notes its “unconsciously imperialistic” tendencies—imperialistic in the sense that the approach restores the genre to the “empire called ‘knowledge’ that obfuscates ‘the specificities of a complex cultural form.’”31 The sociological understanding of this genre as “fiction of comfort,” she adds, squarely places it with “the long-entrenched prejudices” which, since the days of the May Fourth Movement, have ridiculed it as undesirable youxi.32 As a result neither approach offers an understanding of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction as “radical disruptions of Chinese literary history.”33 Communist literary historians associated with two anthologies produced in the Mainland are Chow’s fourth target. These two anthologies are, namely, Research Materials on the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School (1962, 1980), and Materials on Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature (1984).34 Chow notes that these historians acknowledge mandarin duck and butterfly fiction as a “manifestation of a particular period in history.” For her, their particular deployment of the “historical materialist” principle to reflect the reality of history “truthfully,” construed as “scientific,” is problematic because this ultimately relegates the genre to the totalizing impetus in “the idealist constitution of a ‘people’s tradition.’”35 Finally she concludes: 30. Ibid., 43–45. 31. Ibid., 47–49. 32. Ibid., 40, 50. 33. Ibid., 49. 34. Wei Shaochang, ed., Research Materials on the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School [Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao] (Shanghai, 1962; repr. Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1980); and Fan Boqun et al., eds., Materials on Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature [Yuanyang hudie pai wenxue ziliao] (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1984). 35. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 47.



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If there is one thing that unifies the various types of criticisms above, it is the neglect of the question of woman. This does not mean, of course, that the critics . . . fail to notice that there are women characters in [the] stories, but rather, that the issue of women does not become for them a point of rupture, an opening into a different type of reading. Women may be mentioned but only under the “larger” headings of history, society, tradition . . . and under “bigger” concerns such as reform and revolution.36

Thus Chow advocates a rereading of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, and by extension, a rethinking of practices in literary and cultural criticism that have “erased, abstracted, and substituted” women under the rubrics of “larger” headings and “bigger” concerns, by way of “woman.”37 The method of rereading and rethinking amounts to a “critical intervention” vis-à-vis “the neglect of woman’; an aspect of the battle among discourses for hegemony in “the power-invested processes of hierarchization and marginalization,” and by extension the consolidation of grand narratives (and attendant ideologies) of canonicity and continuity, with respect to modern Chinese fiction.38 This therefore means “deconstructing institutionalized criticism’s erudite and persuasive mishandling of popular cultural forms.”39 Deconstruction as such also “reveals the limits of the society” that “devalued [them] as false and deluded.”40 Secondly, “the way of ‘woman’ critical method ‘makes visible subtle connections between apparently unrelated forms of discrimination” in writing and its criticisms, as well as in representations and their (mis)readings.41 In interrogating and redressing the matter of 36. Ibid., 50, 52. 37. Ibid., 50, 50–83. 38. Ibid., 52, 53. 39. Ibid., 55. 40. Ibid.. 41. Ibid., 52.

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neglect and mishandling then, it seeks an alternative understanding of the figure of woman in modern Chinese fiction, from literature to film; and it keeps a keen eye on the figuration and narration that map rupturings of and collaborations with existing ideologies. Keeping a keen eye means reading woman as a “narrative image” (in Teresa de Lauretis’s sense of the term42). This firstly involves transposing the Mulveyian gaze to the site of narrativity other than the visual order alone.43 For Chow, Laura Mulvey’s theory of gaze, while yielding a “rigid polarization between manas-gaze and woman-as-image,” is worth savaging because it throws light on women “as the oppressed side of the polarization.”44 Secondly, reading woman as a “narrative image” joins the image and the story. It interlocks the visual (gaze) and the narrative, circumscribing “a locus of double identification” that (re)positions the oppressed not as mere objects, but as active subjects in social discourse.45 Hence Chow postulates, “It is through a careful discussion of what this ‘doubleness’ signifies that the ‘female spectator’ offers the potential of a new means of sociocultural inquiry.”46 This is an inquiry that would square “woman”—now understood as active and having subjective agency—with the “larger” headings and “bigger” concerns for history, society, tradition, reform and revolution that have collectively rendered her as insignificant and superfluous. I would add that Chow’s particular theorization of the “double” identifying relations with respect to female spectatorship can also be extended to incorporate male spectatorship in the male-female 42. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 144. 43. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 159–76, and “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988), 69–79. 44. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 20. 45. Ibid., 19, 20. 46. Ibid., 20.



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continuum for reading by way of “woman.” What, then, does this mean for my interests in the “three-women” film, and through that lens, Peking Opera Blues?

Paradigm Shifts The “three-women” film, by definition, features three female protagonists who are at the center of the narrative action, often functioning as narrative hinges that control the story flow in the plot. The drama of three women characteristically unfolds against a historical backdrop, each symbolically signifying, mirroring, and embodying a particular aspect of societal transitions consequent to epochal changes or other turbulent socio-political transformations in modern China. The three women characters would normally be played by the stars of the day (as in the case of the “three-women” film discussed here, including Peking Opera Blues). Sometimes they are linked to the male protagonist—who is usually liberal-minded— in romantic ways of one kind or another, yielding sentimental love stories that may or may not end tragically. This motif is more recurrent in “three-women” films of prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong cinema than in those made in more recent times. The paradigmatic shift corresponds with women’s rising social standing in highly modernized, post-Confucian Hong Kong. The three female characters in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues, for example, do not fall in love with Ling Pak-Hoi or Tung Man, the film’s two male leads; though Pat Neil is attracted to Pak-Hoi at first sight, while Tung Man is fond of Sheung Hung. Although the four have spent a night together in the same bed in Pat Neil’s room (Scenario 15), there are no romantic or other complications the morning after. What might have happened the night before under the cover of a warm blanket was, as noted before, left entirely to the imagination. In mandarin duck and butterfly literature, a ménage

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à quatre (with or without sex) is utterly unimaginable, while young, unmarried people found in potentially sexually compromising scenarios face dire, even tragic, consequences. Thus He Mengxia and Bai Liniang, fearing gossip, would exchange love letters even though they lived in the same house, while Shen Fengxi of Tixiao yinyuan (both in the novel and the films) is brutally whipped after she was seen secretly meeting her fiancé (Fan Jiashu) in a park. In Peking Opera Blues the themes of love at first sight and of fond affection are never developed into a full-blown sentimental love story, in the tradition of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction. Instead the film focuses on the respective pursuits of three women in which romantic love takes a back seat. Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York (Golden Glory, 1990), on the other hand, dispenses with the male protagonist altogether, as well as the grand narrative of the tumult of sociopolitical transformations that throws the protagonists, female and male, together into various states and degrees of affective dependency. Instead, the film looks at the lives of three women, from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung’s Li Fengjiao), Taiwan (Sylvia Chang’s Huang Xiongping), and mainland China (Siqin Gaowa’s Zhao Hong), respectively, and at how they surmount sociocultural differences to build a friendship based on mutual suffering and understanding in surviving life in New York. Yet others like Michael Mak’s Moon Star and Sun (Media Asia,1988), including Tsui Hark’s other “three-women” film, All About Women (2008), have career women experiencing difficulties in conducting heterosexual relationships in the consumerist societies of 1980s Hong Kong and 2000s Beijing, respectively. They each have a different man to love or hate. Finally, Mabel Cheung’s The Soong Sisters (Golden Harvest, 1997) is a historical biopic about the famous Soong family in which three sisters become entwined with the political destinies of modern China, while the three women in Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio, and its sequel Executioners, both produced by China Entertainment Films in 1993, are super-warriors more



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keen on tackling villains and solving crimes than finding time for romantic interludes. The paradigmatic shift, evident since the 1980s, while articulating the changing social status of women, also parallels the rise of the consumer society in Hong Kong and mainland China. In consumer society the “sign-value,” an essential constituent of commodity and consumption, and also as a primary determinant of social identity, standing and prestige, takes precedent over the “use-value” and “exchange-value” that characterize social relations in the production-based political economy.47 To sum up, then, “three-women” films contain women-centered narratives about female strength and bonding, or the lack thereof. They explore female affectivity and sexuality within heterosexual contexts, and articulate ruptures in and also collaborations with existing ideologies in relation to particular “Chinese” time and space, inside or outside China.

Adaptations In Chinese-language cinema, the six-part Tixiao yinyuan (dir. Zhang Shichuan)48 is probably the first “three-women” film. Produced by Mingxing in 1932, it is based on Zhang Henshui’s mandarin duck and butterfly novel of the same name (whose English title has been translated as “Fate in Tears and Laughter”49). Zhang’s novel, first published in 1931, began as a newspaper serialization in Shanghai’s Xinwen bao, or News Paper, some two years earlier, and quickly found a popular following.50 May Fourth iconoclasts such as Xia 47. Jean Baudrillard (1970), The Consumer Society: Myth and Structure, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998). 48. Zhang Wei has attributed the directorship to Cheng Bugao. Zhang Wei, Watching Movies on Paper 1921–1949 [Zhi shang guanying lu 1921–1949] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2005), 110. 49. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 42. 50. Zhang, Watching Movies on Paper, 106.

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Zhengnong were not impressed though, criticizing the novel as an “accidental” piece of “social conscious” work which fails to “set off from within ‘the progressing action of society.’”51 The Tixiao yinyuan phenomenon was an urban legend of its time. The novel was a bestseller, with dramatists and opera scenarists soon adapting it for the stage. In 1931, Mingxing, then the foremost film studio in Shanghai, acquired the movie rights. It initially made plans for a three-part, black-and-white silent movie. The final product, as it turned out, was a part-silent, part-sound, part-monochromatic and part-orthochromatic film, with a total of six installments.52 As Chen Wenping and Cai Xufu (2007) recount: Tixiao yinyuan was Mingxing’s first large-scale production that deploys the sound technology. Each installment has ten reels. Six were shot in black and white, and without sound. Of the remaining four installments, two reels were shot with color film-stock, and two with sound film-stock . . . The film was primarily shot in Peking. Generally speaking, the guiding principle was this: color film-stock would be used when shooting on location at scenic spots in the districts of Pak-Hoi, Shichahai, Xi Shan, Xiannongtan and others, while on-site sound would be taken in scenes featuring singing or opera performances at the general’s mansion, such as when the “Four Seasons of Lovesickness” (Siji xiangsi) song is sung, the act in which the general whips Fengxi, and in scenarios at Ren Neng Temple, and so on.53

Zhang’s novel would, in time, see at least six more film adaptations.54 Yi Hua Studio remade the Mingxing production in 1940 51. Cited in Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 42. 52. Chen Wenping and Cai Xufu, eds., 100 Years of Shanghai Cinema [Shanghai dianying 100 nian] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2007), 129–30; and Zhang, Watching Movies on Paper, 106–10. 53. Chen and Cai, 100 Years of Shanghai Cinema, 129. 54. In more recent years, the novel has yielded TV adaptations in Hong Kong



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in Shanghai, with Sun Jing as director. Postwar Hong Kong cinema has five variants, comprising two Cantonese and three Mandarin versions. The Cantonese versions are Yin Cheng’s two-part A Story of Three Lovers (1952), co-directed and co-scripted by Yang Gongliang and Yin Haiqing, and Hua Qiao’s A Fate of Tears and Laughter (dir. Li Chenfeng, 1957).55 The three Mandarin versions are the aforementioned 1963 MP & GI production of The Story of Three Loves, and Shaw Brothers’ productions of Between Tears and Smiles (retitled in Chinese as Gudu chunmeng, dir. Yueh Feng, 1964) and Lover’s Destiny (retitled in Chinese as Xin tixiao yinyuan, dir. Chor Yuan, 1975). These adaptations are similar to the novel in certain ways. First, they all carry the central plot of Fan Jiashu (a young, rich man) and his three “loves”: Shen Xifeng (a singer), Guan Xiugu (a pugilist), and He Lina (a socialite). The subplots vary between the novel and the adaptations. For example, the Mingxing production ends with the rich man reuniting with the socialite, whereas in the novel the rich man reconciles with the singer. The film poster of Yi Hua’s 1940 adaptation, on the other hand, bills the film as a “tragedy” (beiju), which in all likelihood means the film does not have a happy ending.56 Finally, as in the novel, the adaptations are all set in the warlord era of Republican China, and would seem to have in common the sentiments of anti-warlordism. General Liu is portrayed as a licentious, vicious, and jealous warlord who practices polygamy and has contempt for (e.g., TVB, 1974), and mainland China (e.g., Anhui TV, 1995). See Baidu, “Tixiao yinyuan,” http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E5%95%BC%E7%AC%91% E5%9B%A0%E7%BC%98&prd=button_doc_jinru. Baidu, “Huangmei Xi TV series, 1995,” http://baike.baidu.com/subview/254026/5110454.htm. Baidu, “Tixiao yinyuan (TV Drama Starring Yuan Li and Hu Bing, 2004: http:// baike.baidu.com/subview/254026/5110455.htm (all accessed January 7, 2014). 55. Their Chinese title is the same: Tixiao yinyuan. 56. Zhang, Watching Movies on Paper, 108.

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ziyou lian’an. His harsh and abusive treatment of Fengxi eventually breaks her down mentally. In the Mandarin versions from Hong Kong, Fengxi dies. The exception is Between Tears and Smiles: like in the novel and also in two Cantonese adaptations, she survives.

The Story of Three Loves Of the film adaptations, surviving prints no longer exist except for the 1957, 1963, 1964 and 1975 productions, which are now available in digital format. Of these, MP & GI’s The Story of Three Loves is the best known. This “super production in Eastmancolour” took about two years to complete.57 The film’s explicit production design would have irked the May Fourth literati, especially those who objected to the use of wenyi zhi dao and youxi as the organizing principles for fiction. They would have objected because, or as International Screen, MP & GI’s in-house film magazine, puts it, The Story of Three Loves is a “shocking, eye-opening doctrine about the ways of the world” (jingshi xingyan) which has an “infectious effect” (ganranhua zuoyong) on the “human heart” (renxin), while its “dramatization” (xiju fangshi) of the dao (way) is “moving” (dongren), “entertaining” (yule), and “the most worthwhile watching” (zui zhide yikan) aspect of the film.58 As is standard for the “three-women” film, The Story of Three Loves casts the stars of the day: Grace Chang playing the twin roles of Shen Fengxi and He Lina, and Lin Tsui (aka Jeanette Lin) as Guan Xiugu. These actresses are in turn supported by well-known veterans such as Chao Lei, Chiao Hung, and Wang Ying in the respective roles of Fan Jiashu, Warlord Liu, and Guan Shoufeng 57. Anonymous, “‘A Story of Three Loves’ Is a Spectacular Success,” International Screen 4 (March 1963): 101. 58. Anonymous, “The Story of Three Loves: All Its Stars Are Dedicated” (Tixiao yinyuan: Mingxing ge ge maili), International Screen (July 1963): 93.



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(Xiugu’s father). The three women characters in this star-studded production are narrative images that not only signify and symbolize representative female prototypes of the Republican era, but also mirror the very societal transitions that figure them as particular products of historical shifts. But as typical of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, the film’s refusal to connect the individual to the social renders them as politically ambivalent figures. The political question pertaining to the lack of universal education in Republican China as a synecdoche to the social problem of affordable schooling for girls and for the poor, is thus presented—as in the case of Shen Fengxi’s situation—as a personal issue. Not only that, the film also portrays this issue as something that can be simply resolved with the help of a kind and generous benefactor. Fengxi is an orphan. She lives with her aunt and uncle, and sings for a living to support her adopted family, performing at market places and teahouses where she has to endure sexual harassment from time to time. When Fan Jiashu falls in love with her, he decides to take her off the streets, pay for her schooling (since that is what she wants) and finally, out of a strong sense of obligation, assume the responsibility of providing for her aunt and uncle as well. Like Jiashu, He Lina is also well-heeled. She personifies the modern Westernized woman. She is a popular socialite and has a politically influential father. She wears Western-style clothes, perms her hair, and dances the foxtrot at the high-class Peking Hotel where the affluent mingle. Here, patrons would variously be decked out in suits with a bow tie, ballroom gowns, or silk tunics with a Western-style skirt, topped with Chinese collar and buttons; and they do other yang (foreign) things such as listening to live band music, drinking brandy, smoking cigars, and waltzing on the dance floor. The affluent also furnish their home with sofas, chandeliers and other modern amenities, including the telephone, which display their cosmopolitan taste and high social standing. They call each other by their surname using English terms like “Miss” and

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“Mister” as a prefix—this apparently being a fashionable thing to do. That Jiashu is not particularly keen on Lina, despite her open affection for him, manifests a particular aloofness towards Western modernity. Jiashu is a student from the south (Zhejiang) presently studying in Peiping. He boards with his cousin and wife. He cannot dance at all, but has English books in his bedroom. Although he occasionally dons Western-style clothes, he prefers the Chinese changpao and Zhongshan suit. He enjoys wandering around the more down-to-earth environs in and around the market places at the Tian Qiao District, where the poor such as Fengxi and Xiugu make a living as street performers, much more so than partying at Peking Hotel. Neither Fengxi nor Xiugu wear Western-style clothes. The former keeps a long braid, while the latter wears her hair short and unpermed. But like Lina, or for that matter Jiashu, they desire love and romance. The film presents a moderate version of the Confucian protocol for courtship and marriage: although parental approval remains imperative, the young are allowed a certain measure of freedom in terms of their choice of dates. Of the three women in this MP & GI adaptation of Tixiao yinyuan, Xiugu epitomizes the Chinese woman who most embodies the Confucian structure of feelings: she is filial, reserved in manner, and above all, keeps her secret and therefore unrequited love for Jiashu to herself. This Confucian daughter has martial arts skills. She is clearly untouched by Republican modernity, unlike Fengxi who has had the opportunity to go to school (with Jiashu’s support), or Lina who can dance the foxtrot. (In the novel, the latter has studied in England as well.) The Confucian structure of feelings can further be glimpsed in Guan Shoufeng’s attempt to facilitate his daughter’s marriage to Jiashu on her behalf, and also in the daughter’s decision to risk her life by masquerading as a maid with the hope of rescuing Fengxi from the clutches of Warlord Liu.



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Both acts are motivated by the Confucian ethics of mutual help and reciprocation. Jiashu is a filial son and would travel a great distance to visit his sick mother. He once saved Shoufeng’s life by paying his medical bills. So Shoufeng seeks to express his appreciation by offering Xiugu to Jiashu in marriage. This gesture, vis-à-vis the option of ziyou lian’ai which the young have, underscores a cusp in the transition between the older Confucian practice of arranged marriage, to its more modern variety that scorns totalizing parental control in these matters. Hence the three women have the freedom to love Jiashu, who in turn has the option to choose between them, though he ultimately loves only Fengxi. Like her father, Xiugu similarly feels obligated to repay Jiashu for his act of kindness. In risking her life for Jiashu, she subjugates her personal interest and discomfort to Confucian mores: Fengxi, after all, is her rival in love. Fengxi is also Lina’s love rival. Similar to Xiugu, Lina makes a personal sacrifice in the name of love when she urges her politically influential father to intervene on Jiashu’s behalf and help secure Fengxi’s release. After Warlord Liu sends home Fengxi, now a mad woman, to her aunt and uncle where she soon dies, he coerces Xiugu into marrying him. After Fengxi dies, Jiashu asks Shoufeng (a martial arts master) to help him take revenge on the warlord. On Xiugu’s wedding night, the two sneak into his holiday bungalow. Inside the wedding chamber, Xiugu stabs the drunken warlord. He pulls a gun. She runs and he follows. In the ensuing fight between the father and the warlord, both die. The film, unlike the novel, ends with Jiashu and Xiugu leaving Peiping on a train for an unknown destination. On the train, Jiashu puts his arm, at first hesitantly, around the now orphaned Xiugu, who then rests her head on his chest. It is not clear if Jiashu will fall in love with Xiugu eventually. What is clear though is that the young man feels duty bound to honor his promise to the Xiugu’s father just before his death that he would take care of his daughter.

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It is the film’s unrelenting disinclination to link the individual and the social, narratively or otherwise, that closely connects this adaptation with mandarin duck and butterfly fictions. The insistent characterizing of Jiashu as a generous, but ultimately weak man, who, in The Story of Three Loves, has to rely on two women to rescue his beloved, feminizes Confucianism built on male authority. This narrative theme instantiates ruptures in Confucian patriarchal ideologies, but the film recuperates them in other ways. Although Lina and Xiugu have been instrumental in helping Jiashu obtain Fengxi’s release (with the latter later going as far as helping to avenge her death), the two women are mere facilitators of the process. In actuality it is through the powerful intervention of a patriarch figure, such as Lina’s or Xiugu’s father, that the tasks are accomplished. This kind of contestation and restoration vis-à-vis dominant ideologies is characteristic of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction. As Haiyan Lee puts it in a different context, it points to: the tension between the imperative to uphold the hierarchies of social relationships and the need to validate the emotive foundation of these relationships, as well as the tension between the desire to hold onto a moral ideal and the growing recognition of its vulnerability under the onslaught of modernity.59

Straddling the traditional (most represented by Xiugu) and the modern (most embodied in Lina), Fengxi articulates such tensions. These tensions are teased out in Fengxi’s dual roles first as a street singer with a history of poverty and deprivation, and then as a schoolgirl with a promising future that education and love offer. Warlord Liu literally strips her of her present status as a schoolgirl, and in forcefully returning her to her past status as a singer he claims her as his concubine. Fengxi initially refuses but finally bows to the new status the warlord has conferred upon her as a claimed 59. Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 75.



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possession. He has after all raped her, meaning that she is now too soiled to be worthy of Jiashu’s love. Later he whips her when he finds out that she has had a secret meeting with her fiancé (Jiashu). This and other harsh treatment that Fengxi suffers at the hands of the warlord drives her insane and eventually to death. The metaphorical collapsing of the present and the past with a bleak and hopeless future, embodied in Fengxi’s plight, powerfully conveys the film’s ambivalence with regard to the traditional and the modern, all the more so when Jiashu clearly loves neither Xiugu nor Lina. Fengxi’s death in The Story of Three Loves marks a departure from Zhang’s novel, which ends with a happy reunion of the lovers (after having endured untold miseries). In returning Fengxi to Confucian realms, now as Jiashu’s possession, this ending short-circuits her opportunity to realize self-agency and self-determination through education. If the potentially liberating forces encapsulated in the idea of education for girls and the poor in The Story of Three Loves literally expire with the death of Fengxi, then such forces in the novel simply run out of steam. That is to say, both the film and the novel are caught in the vicious cycle that pits Confucian practices against enlightened modernity. In short, they eschew the enlightenment structure of feelings of the May Fourth Movement.

Three Modern Girls Made in Shanghai, Lian Hua’s Three Modern Girls (1933),60 in contrast, yields to the enlightenment structure. This is most evident in scenarios that explicitly reject the Confucian practice of arranged marriage, the decadence of the petty bourgeoisie, and the sentimental frivolity of unrequited love. That the left-wing cultural circle of the May Fourth Movement has named this film, from a total of 60. This film is not available for viewing at the time of writing this book. My reconstruction here relies on published material in the archive.

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sixty-six productions made in 1933, as one of the six “progressive” films of that year is hardly surprising.61 Scripted by Tian Han, a well-known May Fourth figure, Three Modern Girls features stars Ruan Lingyu, Li Zhuozhuo, and Chen Yanyan in the roles of Zhou Shuzhen, Yu Yu, and Chen Ruoying respectively, each embodying certain traits of modern womanhood. The film is set in a modern Shanghai, depicted as “a burning oven which destroys young lives and where the weak in will would be led astray.”62 Strong-willed Shuzhen is a progressive modern woman. She gets over her rejection by her betrothed, Zhang Yu (Jin Yan), who flees the arranged marriage by going to Shanghai, where he soon becomes a movie star. She learns to value ziyou lian’ai. In the course of the film, she valiantly partakes in national defense (against the Japanese invaders) as a volunteer nurse, and also represents the striking workers in an industrial action, even when this means losing her job and getting hurt in a scuffle with the police.63 The other two women, though modern, are somewhat flawed and unenlightened. Yu Yu is a socialite who enjoys the glamorous lifestyle of the petty bourgeoisie (not unlike He Lina). She refuses patriotic duties, and marries a Hong Kong businessman who can satisfy her material needs. Chen Ruoying, on the other hand, displays the sentimental frivolity of a movie-star fan when she commits suicide because Zhang Yu rejects her. Zhang Yu is also romantically connected to the socialite, first as her boyfriend and, after the death of her husband, her lover. In the Tixiao yinyuan corpus (both novel and films), all the characters lack the kind of social consciousness that Zhou embodies and that 61. Chen Bo, ed., China Cinema: An Annual Chronicle [Zhongguo dianying biannian jishi], Vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongyang chubanshe, 2005), 110. 62. Translation mine. Centre of China Film Art, China Left-Wing Film Movement [Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993), 229. 63. Zhiwei Xiao, “Three Modern Girls,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Film, eds. Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao (London: Routledge, 1998), 334–35.



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manifests in her endeavors to serve society as a patriotic nurse; in her undertakings to effect social change by leading a worker’s strike; in her efforts to educate Zhang Yu to the misfortunes of Shanghai’s underclass working in factories and at the docks, and finally in her unswerving belief in “free love” as the route to the autonomous self. That is to say, she personifies “self-awakenings chronicled in romantic fiction . . . about the relation between self and community that supplies a model for love of nation, or patriotism.”64 As Haiyan Lee says, “If the Confucian structure of feelings is preoccupied with ‘virtuous sentiments,’ then the enlightenment structure is obsessed with ‘free love.’”65

Sun Moon Star Based on the bestseller of the same name by Xu Shu, published in Hong Kong (1958) and shot on location in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the 1960 MP & GI production of Sun Moon Star celebrates ziyou lian’ai in more ways than one. Like Jiashu of The Story of Three Loves, the male protagonist Xu Jianbai has three loves: Zhu Lan (a.k.a. A-Lan), Ma Qiuming, and Su Yanan, who are played by the stars of the day, Grace Chang, You Min (a.k.a. Lucilla), and Yeh Fung (a.k.a. Julie), respectively. Jianbai (played by Zhang Yang) is a country boy. He lives with his parents, grandmother, and younger brother in a village in southern China. The Xu family is relatively well off. Fellow villager A-Lan, on the other hand, is poor and sickly, and an orphan. She resides with her uncle and his wife, who frequently ill-treat her. She has some primary school education. When her uncle and his wife try to marry her off, she has the courage to 64. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Cultures, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 92, 95. 65. Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 16.

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stand up to them due to her love for Jianbai. The two are childhood sweethearts who would sneak out at night and meet by a pond to enjoy stargazing. Later, Jianbai goes to a high school in the city where he meets his cousin and now schoolmate Qiuming, who falls in love with him. She takes care of him unselfishly when he suffers a severe bout of typhoid. He finds himself falling for her but cannot put A-Lan out of his mind. To the delight of both families, Jianbai and Qiuming subsequently become engaged and plan to get married after his graduation. When his grandmother dies, he rushes home to her funeral where he reunites with A-Lan. The reunion rekindles his love for A-Lan, who agrees to elope with him. When Qiuming and her mother turn up for the funeral, he is torn between his two loves. Qiuming visits A-Lan at her home and takes pity on the sickly girl who tells her: I am ill and probably have another year or two to live. Why shouldn’t I elope with Jianbai and enjoy myself for a change? I have been enduring the pain of illness and the suffering of ill-treatment, for years.

Qiuming postpones her marriage plan. Jianbai runs away alone, while Qiuming and A-Lan overcome their differences and become good friends. A-Lan eventually accepts Qiuming’s suggestion to move to the city and live with her at her family home, and finally to train as a nurse. In the meantime, Jianbai heads north to study in a university. On the train he meets Su Yanan, a girl from Nanyang. She has come to China for three reasons: to escape an arranged marriage, to pursue a university education, and as it turns out, most importantly, to participate in national defense. She scoffs at romantic love. At the university, Yanan becomes the chief secretary of the Student Autonomous Association and the Student Rescue Association, and seeks out Jianbai for the position of an administrator for the two



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student soldier setups. The two thus get to know each other, and soon become romantically entangled. When the Sino-Japanese War breaks out, they and other student soldiers retreat to the countryside along with other war refugees. At a farmer’s home, two of their good friends get married in a simple ceremony that displays their rejection of old Confucian practices in matrimonial matters. Jianbai then proposes marriage to Yanan; however, the next day she abandons him, leaves for the frontline, and becomes a KMT soldier. This devastates him. After several attempts, he manages to get himself assigned to the frontline; his main aim is to find Yanan on the battlefield. In the meantime A-Lan joins the KMT army as a military nurse. Qiuming becomes a part-time volunteer troop entertainer. During the war, both A-Lan and Qiuming run into Jianbai by chance at a military hospital and a train station respectively. At the hospital A-Lan nurses a delirious Jianbai, who suffers from war wounds and calls out Yanan’s name in his sleep. When she hears that Yanan is in the proximity of the hospital, she seeks her out, identifying her from a photograph Jianbai keeps on him. She tells Yanan about Jianbai’s condition and asks if she would pay him a quick visit in the hospital. Yanan is reluctant as she has to leave immediately for the frontline. As in the farmer’s house earlier, Yanan prioritizes patriotic duties over romantic love. Later, while watching a KMT troop entertainment show, Jianbai spots Qiuming. At the time she is performing on stage. He tries to make contact with her but cannot make his way through the crowd. The next day he finds her at the train station as she waits her turn to board the overcrowded train. The two then go to a nearby restaurant. Qiuming reiterates her devoted love for Jianbai, but it is clear that he pines for Yanan, and he tells Qiuming so. The revelation leaves her even more disillusioned with romantic love. Though disappointed, she puts on a brave face. She then bids Jianbai farewell and boards the train.

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After the war, Yanan and Qiuming visit A-Lan at her home in the village. Realizing that she is dying, they spend time with her and try to keep her cheerful. After A-Lan dies, the story moves to Hong Kong where Jianbai tracks down Yanan to a tenement hotel. Declaring his undying love, he pleads with her to marry him. Yanan, who has lost a leg to the war and is now fitted with a prosthetic limb, makes her narrative exit the next day, leaving Jianbai a letter with the following words: “During wartime I gave myself to the country. In peace time, I will give myself to the society.” In despair, Jianbai looks up Qiuming, finds her in a church, and discovers that she has become a Catholic nun. The movie thus ends with the man alone at the seaside mourning his three lost loves. The film ends where it begins, providing a narrative structure that tells Jianbai’s romantic encounters with three women as flashbacks. Although Jianbai desires Yanan most, he is a fickle man when it comes to the matter of the heart—unlike Jiashu of The Story of Three Loves who loves and only loves Fengxi. Conveying his most inner thoughts, the voice-over in the film’s opening offers a commentary on Jianbai’s dilemma regarding his three loves. “This is fate,” Jianbai reminiscences sentimentally, as he stares at the bay by the seaside: Fate has allowed me, an ordinary man, to encounter three extraordinary women. Their genuineness, kindness, and beauty are like the stars, moon, and sun which shine brightly in the sky, forever and ever. Looking at the stars make me think of A-Lan . . . However the moonlight makes the stars look dim and desolate. The moon reminds me of my cousin Qiuming. She is solemn and lucid, but when the morning comes, we see the bright and splendid sun. Comparing Yanan to the sun would be apt: she is strong, courageous, warm—so full of life and energy. But where are they now? The past, present, and future, like people and things, keep changing. Only true love deep in the heart would remain unchanged for thousands and thousands of years, forever and ever, just like the stars, the moon, and the sun.



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Indeed where are they now? What has become of them? The three “extraordinary women” in Jianbai’s life now exist as mere memories to be memorialized. As in Peking Opera Blues, the circularity constructs a metafiction, posing questions about the “past, present, and future” that expose an existential attitude, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an ever-changing world in which the only constant factor is or seems to be “true love.” In Sun Moon Star, Jianbai encounters true love in the forms of A-Lan, Qiuming, and Yanan. Though within sight, they are, for Jianbai, eventually unreachable—like the celestial bodies in the distant sky. As such, the romantic encounters fossilize in his heart as memories of intense love that has slipped through his fingers. In Peking Opera Blues, true love is not linked to romantic love at all. Scenarios of pure lust abound though. For example, Warlord Tun wishes to add Sheung Hung to his harem as his twenty-ninth wife. Warlord Tsao who needs a female companion every night changes lovers regularly. Finally, Commander Lei is a lao dou: he has a soft spot for male cross-sex actors. Rather than romantic love, then, the film locates “true love,” similarly portrayed as effervescent, elsewhere. In Peking Opera Blues, “true love” thus appears in the form of analogies. This is seen in Tsao Wan’s unswerving political commitment to democratic ideals, Pat Neil’s devoted passion for the opera, and, in the case of Sheung Hung, her absolute dedication to a materialist way of life which is comparatively less spiritual in scale and more pragmatic in attitude. As suggested earlier, the metafiction in Peking Opera Blues delineates a political-cum-personal arena for reflecting, in a self-reflexive yet outward-reaching way, on Hong Kong’s uncertain future with regards to the question of 1997. This is framed by the Republican dream of democracy on one hand, and on the other, the promises of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The prevailing tone, mood, and tenor in Sun Moon Star, though similarly conveying the

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sense of a particular generation or of a particular period, imbues the metafiction with affectations that raise introspective (inward-directing) questions about humanity and existentialism, country and creed, moral duties and romantic love. These affectations underscore a melancholic nostalgia that links the past (in China) not only to a bleak present (in Hong Kong), but also an even bleaker future where there seems to be no end to Jianbai’s eternal mourning for the “three extraordinary women” who had left and will continue to leave a deep impact on his “ordinary” life for “thousands and thousands of years, forever and ever.” Looking at the same distant sea and sky, at first in the film’s opening and then again in the film’s closing, Jianbai both remembers and memorializes the three women as the follies of his youth—as missed opportunities. This in turn articulates the affectivity of a young man’s lost innocence and from his present location in postwar Hong Kong, the affectivity for the lost home in the diasporic imaginary as well. Jianbai’s resultant nostalgic melancholia which combines despair with an overwhelming sense of emotional dislocation and physical displacement consequent to the experience of living out a drifting life in turbulent times (luanshi fusheng), and in places other than the ancestral homeland such as Hong Kong (where the familial home and beloved ones were), draws a parallel to “sinicist melancholia.”66 Just like the ancestral homeland from which diasporic Chinese such as Jianbai (who once served in the KMT army) are banished, the three extraordinary women, now remembered and memorialized, are also clearly beyond his reach: one is dead, while the other two turn their back on romantic love. Yanan henceforth dedicates her life in service of society, while Qiuming becomes a Catholic nun. The ideological implication of such scenarios, I would suggest, marks narrative ruptures to both the Confucian and enlightenment 66. Tan See Kam, “Chinese Diasporic Imaginations in Hong Kong Films: Sinicist Belligerence and Melancholia,” Screen 42, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1–20.



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structures of feelings in the revolution of the heart in modern Chinese fiction, in a number of ways. With respect to the Confucian structure of feelings, the three women are clearly post-Confucian entities. They are self-sufficient emotionally in that they are ultimately not reliant on men for self-fulfillment. Unlike Bai Liniang (Jade Pear Spirit), Chen Ruoying (Three Modern Girls), and Shen Fengxi (The Story of Three Loves), whose death directly relates to their respective unrequited love for a man, A-Lan’s death is not driven by romantic complications. She does not pine for Jianbai on her deathbed, for her heart has long given up on him; she has discovered more worthy pursuits such as professional fulfillment (as a nurse) and female friendship with Yanan and Qiuming, who makes the most decisive break from the Confucian structure of feelings by becoming a Catholic nun. With respect to the enlightenment structure that celebrates free love and gender equality, the three women in Sun Moon Star are no less modern in outlook, enlightened in demeanor or progressive in practice than Zhou Shuzhen (Three Modern Girls) is. For example, they all endorse and practice ziyou lian’ai. They also willingly risk their lives for “country and creed” and are therefore regarded as “women of epochal times.”67 In addition to the Confucian structure, Qiuming’s act of becoming a Catholic nun also disrupts the enlightenment structure. It is tantamount to renouncing romantic love, filial piety, and bodily pleasure, and entails turning one’s back to a woman’s social roles as a dutiful daughter or a virtuous wife. Above all, it stands on the offside of state apparatuses that regulate social collectivity and political citizenry. Sun Moon Star is probably the first three-women film to tap into the power of female bonding as a countercheck to the Confucian and enlightenment structures of feelings. As discussed in the above, 67. Anonymous, “Sun Moon Star: Words from the Cast” [Xingxing yueliang taiyang: Yanyuan de hua], International Screen (December 1961): 6.

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the former structure would align with oppressive patriarchal practices that accept arranged marriages and the proscription against widows remarrying as normative. Highly critical of such practices, the enlightenment structure has devolved into the free will to love attitude which permits making alliances, romantic or otherwise, outside matrimony, independent of the family or the state. Pushed to the extreme, this can result in unchecked individualism with anarchist tendencies in tow. While steering a steady course away from the Confucian structure of feelings, Sun Moon Star falls short of anarchy. Although both Yanan and Qiuming reject romantic love willfully, they are ultimately contained by other forms of institutionalized forces: religion for the latter and, in the case of the former, a relatively more abstract entity called society which she seeks to serve but not to change (as an anarchist might do). Of all the female characters in the “three-women” films discussed here, crafty and opportunistic Sheung Hung of Peking Opera Blues arguably comes closest to unchecked individualism in terms of demeanor and portrayal. Is she anarchistic as well? The answer would be in the negative because all she ultimately wants is to make enough money to leave China. Like Sun Moon Star, Peking Opera Blues contains scenarios of empowering female bonding. As if in an explicit show of gender-role reversal in action film, the rescuers of men come in the form of three women: Tsao Wan, Sheung Hung, and Pat Neil (Scenarios 26 and 27). In The Story of Three Loves, Lina and Xiugu too have played the role of rescuers at one point or another. When Warlord Liu keeps Fengxi imprisoned in his home, after raping her and forcing her to become his wife, they agree to Jiashu’s request for help. Lina relies on her father’s close connection to the warlord to secure Fengxi’s release. Prior to that, Xiugu masqueraded as a maid in the warlord’s abode: while keeping a protective watch on Fengxi, she bid for a timely opportunity to release her from the warlord’s clutches. However, the three women never bond in a significant way. Lina,



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for example, has never met Fengxi. Her knowledge of Fengxi as her love rival comes from a photograph and a piece of information she obtains by eavesdropping on a conversation between Jiashu and her father, in which he confesses his love for Fengxi as her fiancé. Although Xiugu treats her love rival as if a sister, the sisterly relationship is not developed into a full-blown mutual support system characterized by a coming together of the heart. This is unlike the case of Qiuming and A-Lan, whose sisterly camaraderie is based not only on mutual suffering and understanding, but more crucially also predicated on a strong and shared desire to overcome or break away from their love for Jianbai. Qiuming’s encounter with A-Lan leads to a sisterly alliance that helps A-Lan fend off her bullies. It also helps them wean off their emotional attachment to the fickle Jianbai. Not only that, A-Lan also becomes a nurse with Qiuming’s encouragement, thus finding her purpose and fulfillment in life. A-Lan becomes Qiuming’s confidante and soul mate. “With you I can speak my heart,” she tells A-Lan. When A-Lan announces she has decided to join the army as a military nurse, Qiuming gives A-Lan her most cherished possession: a necklace with a crucifix. A-Lan then says, “Put it on my neck for me.” The subsequent shot/reverse shot (in close-up) tenderly conveys the film’s one and only homoerotic moment that fetishizes the intensity of their friendship and emotional dependency. Finally, the motif of an empowering female bonding also manifests itself during A-Lan’s dying moments. Qiuming is by her side, as is Yanan. All accept the inevitable, but they remain in good humor to ensure that A-Lan dies in peace knowing that her friends are not overwhelmed by grief. They even make jokes about who should marry Jianbai, and eventually decide that Qiuming is the most suitable candidate, as if parodying the silliness of the affairs of the heart. In Peking Opera Blues, similar themes of sisterly affection and female bonding that empowers women are seen, for example, in the scene where Tsao Wan, Pat Neil, and Sheung Hung console

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and encourage each other (Scenario 12) and where the three lounge about in drunken revelry before the warmth of a fireplace (Scenario 13). Here, they simply enjoy the company of each other in silence, or else make idle talk while playing with a globe of the world. They do not talk about men or romantic love, though interestingly it is the man (Tsao’s father), or rather his presence at the scene, that breaks up the party (Scenario 13b).

Co-opting the Romantic In blending romantic love, patriotism, and nationalism, Sun Moon Star falls in with the ernü yingxiong (the heroism of sons and daughters) fiction. This is reminiscent of Three Modern Girls and Xu Zhenya’s mandarin and butterfly novel, Jade Pearl Spirit. According to Haiyan Lee, Jade Pear Spirit ends with “the ultimate tableau vivant of sentimental heroism” when He Mengxia, after the deaths of Bai Liniang (the widow he loves) and Cui Yunqian (the wife of his loveless marriage), dies as a heroic martyr on the battlefield during the Wuhan uprising.68 As Lee has pointed out, this terminating point for all passionate pursuits, portrayed as the most worthy, provides the “first articulation of the relationship between ernü (sons and daughters) and yingxiong (heroes)” in mandarin duck and butterfly fiction.69 The discourse of ernü yingxiong is more fleshed out in Three Modern Girls, with both Zhang Yu and Zhou Shuzhen going to the frontline and surviving the battlefield. It sets up romantic love as equivalent but ultimately subordinate to patriotism. In Three Modern Girls and Sun Moon Star, as in Xu’s novel, the romantic impulse is co-opted by politics through sublimation which channels libidinal energy into politically acceptable outlets: the anti-Japanese resistance war in the case of the first 68. Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 83. 69. Ibid.



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two,70 while in the last case, the Wuhan uprising that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Chinese Republic. The romantic impulse is never repressed out of existence though. In Three Modern Girls, the two betrotheds, Zhang Yu and Shuzhen, initially reject each other to pursue free love, but in the course of the film they learn to love each other. The film thus ends with the two holding hands in affection.71 That is to say, they not only stand up to the Confucian patriarchal familialism, but also find, or are rewarded with, the fruits of ziyou lian’ai. Although Xu Jianbai of Star Moon Sun eventually loses his three loves to death, religion, and society, the romantic impulse manifests itself in the lingering depth of his melancholia. The revolutionary structure of feeling evident in this film is indeed distinct to the enlightenment structure in Three Modern Girls because it ultimately attempts to rein in unchecked heroism: “The war is over,” Jianbai thus pleads with Yanan at a tenement hotel in Hong Kong after the war: “We don’t need to be heroes anymore. We want to be normal people, living a normal life as a normal couple.” The strictures upon unrestrained egoism implied in the discourse of free love, perceived as inimical to the foundation of patriarchal familialism and nationalism, pave the way for the revolutionary structure of feelings which sanctions Confucianist revisionism tempered with 70. According to a film synopsis for Three Modern Girls, Zhang Yu leaves for the frontline after the “January Twenty-Eighth” incident, while Zhou Shuzhen gives up her job as a telephone operator and becomes a military nurse. (The incident is so-called because that was the date the Japanese Imperial Army attacked the KMT’s nineteenth battalion in Shanghai in 1932. The ensuing war ended with a ceasefire some three months later.) In the film Zhang meets Zhou while recuperating from a battle wound in a hospital. Chen and Zou, 100 Years of Chinese Cinema, 222. In Sun Moon Star, the patriots explicitly join the KMT army. There is no mention of the Communist army. The Japanese army is not seen in the film though they are alluded to as the enemy. 71. Ibid.

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a dose of bourgeois family values. In Sun Moon Star, the sanctioning and tempering are inferred in the term “normal” in Jianbai’s pleas, which Yanan rejects. That is to say, the revolutionary structure amounts to a form of compromise that pursues a midway path between two “extremes”: the virtuous sentiments in the Confucian structure that celebrate personal sacrifices as the most noble articulation of love and romance, and the sentiments of ziyou lian’ai in the enlightenment structure that revels in the utopia of the autonomous self who supposedly has the free will to love or make alliances with whomever or whatever they desire, independent of the family. The revolutionary structure therefore seeks to: [negate] the radical implications of the enlightenment structure, while recuperating elements of the Confucian structure. Its . . . articulation, revolution plus romance, is an attempt to resolve the basic conflict of modernity between the heroic and the everyday as well as to address the paradoxical status of emotion in the modern episteme. Love now “supplements” subjectivity, but it also sternly called upon to “efface its supplementary role” . . . so that it does not contest the hegemony of the collective project [of nation building] . . . The broad appeal [is] . . . in its blending of a popularized version of May Fourth liberalism with older and still cherished Confucian values.72

Although Yanan does not heed Jianbai’s pleas for returning to a life of normalcy now that the war has ended, her final words to him, given in a letter which she writes to him before heading to the airport alone, thereby abandoning Jianbian to his wits (for the third time in the film), indicate that she has found a new battlefield: society. Rather than marking a decisive rupture in the revolutionary structure, these last words retain her within the circuit because dedicating oneself to “society” is, like the act of fighting 72. Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 16, 140.



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the Japanese invaders during the war, a politically acceptable outlet for an army veteran seeking to do social good, or an alternative to romantic love. In a sense, Yanan’s reincarnation in Peking Opera Blues would be Tsao Wan, who enjoys revolutionary work and has no time for romantic love—but with a slight variation: Tsao Wan is a cross-dresser.73

The Three-Women Lens As we have seen, Peking Opera Blues is an ernü yingxiong film set in early Republican times. It features three female stars of the day in the lead roles of Tsao Wan, Sheung Hung and Pat Neil. Unlike their counterparts in the earlier “three-women” films discussed here, none of them is romantically involved with the male lead. Both Tsao Wan and Pat Neil are filial daughters. However, the former has to contend with a father who is an opportunistic warlord and so does not share her dedication to the Republican cause, whereas the latter struggles with a father, a theater troupe manager who would steadfastly deny her the dream of becoming an opera performer, but finally relents somewhat. Nonetheless, Pat Neil, like Sheung Hung, eventually becomes a revolutionary hero of sorts when they both help Tsao Wan accomplish her mission. The ironic twist here is that neither Pat Neil nor Sheung Hung is politically committed to the task. That is to say, the two are both accidental and reluctant participants in the revolutionary act of political subversion. Tsao Wan, as a sentimental embodiment of patriotic nationalism, is evocative of the heroic Zhou Shuzhen of Three Modern Girls, and also the three female protagonists of Sun Moon Star, who have committed themselves to national defense dutifully 73. For a discussion of the extent to which Peking Opera Blues has been co-opted, belatedly, as queer film in LGBT film retrospectives in some Western countries, see Stringer, “Peking Opera Blues by Tsui Hark,” 34–42.

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and valiantly. Pat Neil, on the other hand, epitomizes a different type of passion: that for Peking opera. In this regard she is similar to Shen Fengxi and Guan Xiugu of The Story of Three Loves, to the extent that all three excel in traditional folk arts. Whereas Fengxi and Xiugu support their respective families by doing the drumsong acts or by executing martial arts routines in a market square, Pat Neil’s passion is discursively related to the ideal of the arts as an expression of individualism or the autonomous self. Since this runs counter to the theater practice that bars women from the stage, she has a battlefield of her own. Finally, Sheung Hung does not have a family and earns her livelihood as an itinerant musician. Unlike the orphaned A-Lan of Sun Moon Star though, she is a materialist, always on the lookout for ways to enrich herself—by hook or by crook. Through the multiple lens of selected “three-women” films variously made in both Shanghai and Hong Kong such as Tixiao yinyuan (Fate in Tears and Laughters, 1932) and its many remakes (1940, 1952, 1957, 1964 and 1975), with a particular focus on the MP & GI (Hong Kong)’s 1963 production of The Story of Three Loves, Lian Hua (Shanghai)’s Three Modern Girls (1933), and MP & GI (Hong Kong)’s Sun Moon Star (1960), my act of reading of Peking Opera Blues in this chapter has elaborated on the various ways through which the Confucian, the enlightened, and the revolutionary structures of feelings, so central to Haiyan Lee’s notion of a “revolution of the heart” in mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, have been articulated and played out in romance films set in turbulent times that features three women as protagonists. In addition, taking a cue from Rey Chow’s critique of previously recurrent scholastic mishandling and misreading of the figure of the woman in this genre of literature, my positioning of Peking Opera Blues for a reading by way of “woman” vis-à-vis the “three-women” film genealogy has correspondingly emphasized the idea of women as narrative images, highlighting female agencies and subjectivities.



three-women fiction, mandarin ducks and butterflies 187

Finally, what most sets Peking Opera Blues apart from earlier “three-women” films, I would suggest, is a postmodernist structure of feelings that corresponds with the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and postpatriarchal consumerist society that Hong Kong has become in the 1980s. The former gives women not only the choice of ziyou lian’ai (which has become the normative practice in contemporary times) but also more—for example, the normalization of personal goals other than strictly familial ones as worthy pursuits, while the latter in turn provides them with a larger, more democratized playing field that emphasizes gender equality and in so doing, grants female independence. That is to say, women no longer need to rely on men, whether in romantic or other ways, to realize their selfhood or their potential as a whole person—unlike their counterparts in earlier “three-women” films. Thus the three daomadans in Peking Opera Blues are not burdened with the tangle of romantic love: it is as if heterosexual coupling as the primary determinant of a woman’s worth in the economy of social interaction has become irrelevant. In the particular case of Tsao Wan, she most displays female consciousness and independence in the scene where her father gives her a gun for self-protection (Scenario 9b), as the following conversation shows: Father: This gun is a gift from a Frenchman . . . Take it for self-protection. . . . Daughter: Papa, I can take care of myself. You keep the gun. . . . Father: Papa has soldiers to protect me . . . Papa has no sons, only a daughter. All these years I have been worried that I have no inheritor to the fortunes (jiangshan) that I have fought hard to gain . . . Cows plough fields. Horses eat grains. The father brings in the money (fortunes). His children enjoy them. Remember what I just told you—always.

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Tsao Wan eventually accepts the gun, doing so not because she could not protect herself otherwise but because she is moved by her father’s gesture of concern and love for her. To her father it is natural for his children to reap the harvest of his labor—as natural as cows would be used to plough fields and horses would eat grains. However, the daughter, filial as she is, is not keen on that: acquiescing to materialist abundance would entail turning her back on the Republican cause which her father does not support. That is to say, Tsao Wan can choose to be both filial and revolutionary at the same time. She thus needs not fashion herself after her father’s image— not unlike the way in which Pat Neil struggles against the prevailing norms of her time to become an opera performer, in defiance of her father’s expressed orders. In sum, the father-daughter conflict in both cases dramatizes discourses of conflicting loyalty that highlight class interests, differences and contradictions in a patriarchal society, yielding postmodern sensibilities that both fracture and fragment modernist notions of class identity and gendered entities previously construed as stable and natural. These kinds of fracturing, fragmentizing and contradictory characterizations emphasize not so much the use-value and exchange-value in the film’s political economy of social reproduction, as their sign-value. The dizzying eclecticism that results in the constructions of the sign-values, for example, of the three main female characters in the film, the revolutionary woman, the opera-loving woman, and the crafty woman, as a narrative image, a postmodern spectacle, a “trans-aesthetic” object simulates difference and repetition vis-à-vis the Confucian, enlightenment, and revolutionary structures.74 Reading Peking Opera Blues through the intertextual lens of “three-women” films and their generic roots in mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, has yielded valuable results in our understanding 74. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 14–19.



three-women fiction, mandarin ducks and butterflies 189

of the film and Tsui Hark’s work. What we see with the three protagonists is the location of Peking Opera Blues in a deeply intertextual relation to an immensely popular form of sentimental romance fiction which emerged at the dawn of the Chinese Republic during the first decade of the twentieth century when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle.

Postscript

There is another song in Peking Opera Blues. Called “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge,” it draws attention to the hypertextualized pieces that compose, while fracturing and fragmenting, “Mother Nature” (literally “Great Nature” [daziran] in Chinese) (Scenarios 12). The first song, “It’s Showtime Again,” both opens and closes the film. As noted before, it serves as a sound bridge for the film’s opening and closing credits sequences (Scenarios 2 and 30, respectively); the latter, in turn, has a montage of quick cuts assembled not only from the film’s opening but also narrative moments in the plot, including previously unused takes. The repetitions have worked to re-loop the film’s ending to the start of the film. This has granted the film a circular narrative structure that fuses the plot and the story and that defers narrative closure. Repetitions, deferment, and structural ambiguity as such add to the film’s postmodern structure of feeling. These formal elements, together with the film’s recurrent theme of Republican democrats struggling against an authoritarian government represented by warlords and monarchy revivalists



postscript 191

such as Yuan Shikai (a historical figure) and General Tsao (fictive figure), as well as their henchmen, frames a jiegu fengjin metafiction. Through this metafiction, the film imagines the present (1980s Hong Kong) in the past (Republican China). It does so by variously and vicariously drawing on historical hindsight for allegorizing, as the hindsight mediates analogically, lessons of history and present contemplation regarding colonial Hong Kong’s post-1997 future under the “one country, two systems” provision. The provision was first mooted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. Supplemented with guidelines relating to election proceedings based on “universal suffrage” and “democratic procedures,” it was subsequently enshrined in the Basic Law, or HKSAR’s mini-constitution, in 1990. This occurred some four years after the release of Peking Opera Blues. To be sure, the movie is, by no means, an advocacy film in the sense that it does not have an explicit agenda for exerting pressure on the powers that be and for swaying public opinion in favor of democracy as an alternative to political China’s authoritarianism. Far from it. One ought not burden the film with a finely drawn set of political expectations. Yet subtexts as such exist since if nothing else, the film can be said to have played to and is redolent of what I have called China’s “other long march” (in the direction of democratic development), as if reclaiming territory lost during and since the Republican times. This is especially so when the film is viewed in the comparative context of China’s struggles for democracy during the formative years of the Chinese Republic, and the nascent democratic movements which (re-)emerged in the 1980s Hong Kong’s political scene. Finally, looking back at the film self-reflexively, from the time of the Tiananmen protests (1989) to that of Umbrella Movement (2014), it seems ironically prophetic: China’s road to democracy has remained as rocky as ever. The jiegu fengjin metafiction’s play with fragments of historical and fictive time, space and place sits well with the film’s postmodern

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structure of feeling especially via the multiple lens of intertextuality, with respect to the film’s story, form, and composition. It does this in particular by means of editing and mise en scène, and also in relation to Chinese(-language) cultural forms such as Peking opera, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, “three-women” films, and Mandarin Canto-pop songs. To that, I now append the “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” song as a postscript to this monograph, as a way of rounding up my study of the film. I have already alluded to this Mandarin Canto-pop song when discussing the hypertexualized shadowplay of attractions that unfolds in front of the Kwok Wo Theatre where the three women enact a drama of female bonding (Scenario 12). The shadowplay brings together the wonders of ying (shadows or films), the spectacles of xi (play and performance), and the marvelous theatricality of ju (show or opera). It also gives the feeling of watching an on-screen vaudeville-like show which in turn has the parodic effect of transforming the song into an opera-esques aria. (In Peking opera, an aria, usually sung off-stage, introduces and comments on the scene, including the characters therein.) Doubling as an opera-esques aria then, “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” has a chirpy quality: The sky smiles, the flowers flutter Mother Nature is really marvelous People are smiling, heads are shaking Showers of flowers fill the sky, can’t dodge that The winds are blowing, ah, those clouds are fluttering From the edges of the sky, songs ring out The flowers are falling, the flowers are flying The clouds come, the clouds go Wanna hide but can’t dodge1 1. In Chinese the lyrics go like this: 天在笑　花兒在飄 大自然真美妙



postscript 193

The song or aria rings out not “from the edges of the sky” but in the soundtrack that segues and sutures the street scene where Tsao Wan finds a despondent Pat Neil sobbing and a distressed Sheung Hung shivering in the cold outside the Kwok Wo Theatre, after their “Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom” performance (Scenarios 11e and 12a, Table 7a). Like other songs discussed in the foregoing chapters, in relation to this film and also in Shanghai Blues, it is sung in Mandarin (by Sally Yeh) but scored to the beat of 1980s Canto-pop which, as discussed in Act 4, has a curious local and international mix of musical motifs. The “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” song also displays the postmodern structure of feelings characterized by ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic. The elements and entities (wind, snow, humans, etc.) in the song-scape are perennially in motion: they “smile,” “flutter,” “shake,” “fill,” “blow,” “fall,” and “fly” along with the chaotic currents of “marvelous” “Mother Nature.” Within this pastiche of effervescent vivacity, “showers of flowers” in turn float around and about, while “clouds come . . . [and] go.” Against a collage of transient drifts then, “songs ring forth” “from the edges of the sky,” as people smile, their heads shaking. The song, lyrics, and subject matter whip up an aural mishmash of the sung, spoken, and cited. This, together with the deployment of multiple shot compositions (long-and mid-shots, high-angle and low-angle shots, as well as stationary and mobile shots), and assorted film speed (slow motion and real-time motion), to the accompaniment of Tsui Hark’s signatory intercutting style and cluttered mise en scène, creates a proliferation of signs, spectacles, 人在笑　頭兒在搖 那滿天花雨躲不了 風兒在吹啊那雲兒在飄 天邊響起歌謠 花落花飛　雲來雲去 要躲也躲不了

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simulacra, and hyperrealities which are the results of an endless mimesis—copies of copies without reference to an original. The song takes up about forty seconds of a ninety-five-second sequence. At about 36 seconds into the sequence, the film suddenly goes into the slow motion mode. The slow motion is relatively short: no more than five seconds. Coinciding with the song’s opening, its fleeting manifestation yields an expanded, fractured, segmented, and reconstructed perception of time and space. The sudden change of pace draws attention to the film’s schizophrenic quality that parallels the hallucinations in the “Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge” song-scape. Also present in the “It’s Showtime Again” song heard at the film’s opening and closing, as well as in other scenes and scenarios of this filmic-cum-opera-esques shadowplay of attractions, the schizophrenicity enacts, in self-reflexive and self-conscious ways, that which Jean Baudrillard has noted elsewhere: “All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces—that is postmodernism.”2 In so doing, Peking Opera Blues calls into question, as it destabilizes and splinters, grand narratives about history, tradition, ideology, and modernity based on linear, progressive, and continuous time. The postmodern play with the pieces delivers the past, whether inter, intra or extratextually, as fragments of the present. It generates assemblages of parodic piecemeals, pastiches and collages, and establishes an analogue of the dialogue between the past and the present that collectively conjure postmodern time and space as transient and contingent. It is this play with pastiche, supported by self-reflexive and self-conscious intertextuality, that arguably most distinguishes the postmodern structure of feelings in Peking 2. Cited in Mike Gane, ed., Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (London: Routledge, 1993), 95. See also Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).



postscript 195

Opera Blues from its Confucian, enlightenment, and revolutionary counterparts. This play with pastiche further constructs a “heterotopia” in which “an impossible space” of a “large number of fragmentary possible worlds” coexists and where mismatches are juxtaposed with or superimposed upon each other.3 The performativity and narrativity of visually contrasting elements vis-à-vis the song—for example, the “Mother Nature” turning out to be a built environment; the “showers of flowers” falling as snowflakes—underscore a postmodern dramatization of free signifiers in search of reattachments and new, even incommensurable, combinations. This search and the resultant recodification of meanings accordingly become grandiose and acquire spectacular excessiveness inside the visual frame. In addition to rendering the Mandarin Canto-pop song into an opera-esque aria, the hypertextualization of the filmic and the operatic in this meta-cinematic heterotopia has reshaped the proscenium arch of the opera stage as the edges of screen. The reframing of the proscenium, or restaging of the sequence as if a back stage opera-piece within the film proper, yields a postmodern shadowplay of attractions. This results in “contrived depthlessness,” suggesting that: [the] experience of the present becomes more powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and “material”: the world becomes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing the mysterious . . . charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy.4

Finally, to end, with my opening questioning premise, like Tsui Hark’s painted face in Peking Opera Blues—these acts of intertextual readings and considerations brought together in this single book on one single film, out of so many by Tsui Hark, and 3. Michel Foucault, cited in Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 48. 4. Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 120.

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thousands of others by so many more film directors all over the world, have sought to explore the premise whether “no film is an island.” Indeed, it seems not.

Credits

Peking Opera Blues assembles a star-studded cast drawn widely from the Chinese diaspora: Lin Ching-Hsia, Brigitte 林青霞

Tsao Wan 曹雲

Chung Cho-Hung, Cherie 鍾楚紅

Sheung Hung 湘紅

Yeh Chian-Wen, Sally 葉蒨文

Pat Neil 白妞

Cheng Ho-Nam, Mark 鄭浩南

Ling Pak-Hoi 寧北海

Tsang Kong, Kenneth 曾江

General Tsao 曹督軍, a warlord, also Tsao Wan’s father

Chun Pui, Paul 秦沛

Fa Gum-Sao 花錦繡

Wo Ma 午馬

Boss Wong 王老板, or Pat Neil’s father, also Manager of Chun He Ban opera troupe

Tien Ching 田青

Manager Sung 宋經理 of Minsheng Press 民聲出版社

Cheung Kwok Keung 張國強

Tung Man 董民

Ku Feng 谷峰

Commander Lei 雷組長

198

credits

Wong Ha 黃哈

Warlord Tun 段軍閥

Lee Hoi-Sang 李海生

Warlord Tun’s soldier (with “Dali” moustache)

Poon Hang-Sang 潘恆生

Theater doorman

Leung Po-Chick 梁普智

Mr. Kam 金老板, theater owner

Wu Dai-Wai, David 胡大為

Warlord Tsao’s interpreter

Leung Chi-Ming, Willian 梁智明

Warlord Tun’s soldier (with a “dot” moustache)

Lai Wing-Keung, James 黎永強

Warlord Tun’s officer

Ng Kwun-Yu, Sandra 吴君如

Warlord Tun’s wife

Wong Hoi-Yan 黃愷欣

Warlord Tun’s wife

Si-Ma Yin 司馬燕

Warlord Tsao’s female companion (unnamed)

Fung Ging-Man 馮敬文

Warlord Tsao’s officer

Tin Kai-Man, Tenky 田啟文

Cart-pusher

Chang Kwok-Tse 曾國賜

Commander Lei’s man

Fung Yuen-Chi 馮元熾

Overseas Chinese arrested in the street.

Poon Hang-Sang and David Wu, who play cameo roles as the theater doorman and Warlord Tsao’s interpreter, are in turn the film’s cinematographer, and film and music editor respectively. Other credited behind-the-scene talents are: Executive Producer

Chung Chun, Claudie 鍾珍

Director and Co-producer

Tsui Hark 徐克

Scriptwriter

To Kwok Wai 杜國威

Art Direction

Wai Kai-San, Vincent 韋啟新, Ho Kim Sing 何劍聲 and Leung Chi Hing 梁志興



credits 199

Martial Arts Director

Ching Siu Tung 程小東

Costume Designer

Ng Bo-Ling, Bobo 吳寶玲 Cheung Siu-Ping, Peggy 張少萍

Props

Lee Kuen-Long 李坤龍 Cheung Foo-Wing 張富榮

Hair Stylist

Lee Kin-Tai 李檢娣

Makeup

Fung Cho-tak 馮祖德

Consultant (Peking opera)

Lau Shun 劉洵

Special Effects

Cinefex Workshop Co. Ltd. 新視覺特技工作室

Glossary

1:99 Film Project

一比九十九電影行動

A Better Tomorrow

英雄本色

A Better Tomorrow II

英雄本色續集

A Better Tomorrow III

英雄本色 III：夕陽之歌

A Chinese Ghost Story

倩女幽魂

A Chinese Ghost Story II

倩女幽魂 II 人間道

A Chinese Ghost Story III

倩女幽魂 III 道道道

A Chinese Ghost Story—the Tsui Hark Animation

小倩

aiqing (sorrowful love)

哀情

aiqing xiaoshuo

愛情小說

All About Women

女人不壞

An Autumn’s Tale

秋天的童話

Ba Zhen Tu

八陣圖

badao (to block the pathways)

霸道

Bai Liniang

白梨娘

baihua (vernacular language)

白話

bawang (tyrant-king)

霸王



glossary 201

Bawang ying shang gong (The Tyrant-king Mounts a Bow with Brute)

霸王硬上弓

baxi (acrobatic acts )

把戲

beiju (tragedy)

悲劇

bei shang (head north)

北上

Beijing Polybona

北京保利博纳

Between Tears and Smiles

故都春夢

Black Mask II

黑俠

Bona Film Groups

博納影業集團

Boss Wong

王老板

Bu Wancang

卜萬蒼

bufa (criminal)

不法

Butterfly Murders, The

蝶變

C’est La Vie, Mon Cherie

新不了情

caidan (colorful female role-type)

彩旦

Cai Yuanpei

蔡元培

canqing (miserable love)

殘情

Cao Kun

曹錕

chai (jackals)

豺

chailang badao (literally, the jackals and wolves block the way)

豺狼霸道

Chang, Grace

葛蘭

Chang, Sylvia

張艾嘉

changpao (long dress)

長袍

Chao Lei

趙雷

Chen Ruoying

陳若英

Chen Yanyan

陳燕燕

Cheng Ho-Nam

鄭浩南

Cheung Kwok Keung

張國強

Cheung Yuen-Ting, Mabel

張婉婷

Cheung, Maggie

張曼玉

Chiang Kai-shek

蔣介石

202

glossary

Chiao Hung (a.k.a. Rey)

喬宏

Chin Sing-Wai, Wellson

錢昇瑋

China Entertainment

中華娛樂

China Film Co-production Corporation (CFCC)

中國電影集團公司

Ching Siu Tong, Tony

程小東

Chor Yuan (a.k.a Chu Yuan)

楚原

chou (clown role-type)

丑

Chow Yun-Fat

周潤發

Christmas Rose

聖誕玫瑰

Chun Pei, Paul

秦沛

Chung Cho-Hung, Cherie

鍾楚紅

Ciwen Media

慈文傳媒集團

Commander Lei

雷組長

CTV

香港佳藝電視

Cui Yunqian

崔筠倩

D & B Films

德寶電影

Da Guan Film Studio

大觀

dan (female role-type)

旦

Dangerous Encounters—1st Kind

第一類型危險

dao (sabre)

刀

dao (way)

道

daomadan (female warrior role-type; usually of a general, or a person of high social standing such as royalty)

刀馬旦

Deng Xiaoping

鄧小平

dengyingxi

燈影戲

Detective D

狄仁傑之通天帝國

dianguang yingxi (electric shadowplay)

電光影戲 (電影)

Doe Chin

陶秦

dongren (moving in emotional ways)

動人

Dong Yang Huan Yu Media

東陽環宇

Duan Qirui

段祺瑞



glossary 203

Eclipse

薄荷咖啡

Eight Deities Cross the Sea, The

八仙過海

Era of Vampires, The

殭屍大時代

ernü yingxiong (the heroism of sons and daughters)

兒女英雄

Evening Breeze

晚風

Executioners Fa Gum-Sao

東方三俠II, a.k.a. 現代 豪俠傳 花錦繡

Fan Jiashu

樊家樹

Film Biweekly

電影雙周刊

Film Workshop

電影工作室

Fong, Allen

方育平

Full Moon in New York Fung Bo-Bo, Petrina

人在紐約, a.k.a. 三個女 人的故事 馮寶寶

ganranhua zuoyong (infectious affect)

感染化作用

gewu (song-and-dance routines)

歌舞

Golden Dagger Romance

金刀情侠

Golden Glory, or Gam Choi

金采

Golden Harvest

嘉禾

Green Snake

青蛇

Gu Long

古龍

Guan Shoufeng

關壽峰

Guan Xiugu

關秀姑

Guangfuhui (Restoration Society)

光復會

Guangzhou, a.k.a. Canton

廣州

guicai (devilish talent)

鬼才

guimendan (female role-types; usually young, virtuous and respectable ladies)

閨門旦

guofu (father of the nation)

國父

guoyu (national language)

國語

204

glossary

Guolian Studio, a.k.a. Grand Studio

國聯

Hanyu (the language of the Han)

漢語

He Lina

何麗娜

He Mengxia

何夢霞

heimu

黑幕

heimu xiaoshuo (exposé novel)

黑幕小說

henglian (horizontal banner)

橫聯

hengfu baolian

橫賦暴斂

hengke baolian

橫科暴斂

hengqi badao

橫氣霸道

hengxing (to move in a horizontal line)

橫行

hengxing badao

橫行霸道

hengxing bufa

橫行不法

hengzheng baolian

橫徵暴斂

hengzheng kelian

橫徵苛斂

Heroic Trio, The

東方三俠

Historical Novel of the Yang Family Warriors, The

楊家將演義

Ho Kim-Sing

何劍聲

Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKSF) Hong Kong Nocturne

香港專上學生聯會 (學聯) 香港花月夜

Hong Kong, Hong Kong

男與女

Hou Hsiao-hsien

侯孝賢

huadan (flower girl role-type, usually witty maids or maidens)

花旦

hualian (flower face role-type, usually male generals or officials who wear highly elaborate facial makeup)

花臉

Hua Qiao (film studio)

華僑

huaqiao (overseas Chinese)

華僑

Huang Xiongping

黃雄屏



glossary 205

Huayi Brothers

華誼兄弟

Hui, Ann

許鞍華

Hung Kam-Bo, Sammo

洪金寶

huodong yingxi (moving shadowplay)

活動影戲

International Screen

國際畫報

It’s Showtime Again

又是戲一場

J.A. Media

北京吉安永嘉

Jade Pear Spirit

玉梨魂

jiangshan (rivers and mountains)

江山

Jiao Zan

焦贊

jiegu fengjin

借古諷今

Jin Yan

金焰

jing (supernatural role-types)

精

jingshi xingyan (shocking, eye-opening doctrine about the ways of the world)

警世醒言

Ju Dou

菊豆

Kenny Bee

鍾鎮濤

Killer, The

喋血雙雄

Ku Feng

谷峰

kungfu

功夫

kuqing (bitter love)

苦情

Kwai Lun-mei

桂綸鎂

Kwan, Stanley

關錦鵬

Kwok Wo Building

廣和樓

lang (wolves)

狼

laodan (elderly female role-types)

老旦

laosheng (elderly male role-types)

老生

Lau Kar-Wing

劉家榮

Lau Tak-Wah, Andy

劉德華

Lee Han-hsiang (Li Hanxiang)

李翰祥

Legend of Madam White Snake, The

白蛇傳

Legend of Zu, The

蜀山正傳

206

glossary

Leung Chi-Hing

梁志興

Leung Chun-ying

梁振英

li (rites or propriety)

禮

Li Chenfeng

李晨風

Li Fengjiao

李鳳嬌

Li Lianqia

李連恰

Li Lianjie, Jet

李連杰

Li Zhuozhuo

黎灼灼

Lian Hua Film Studio

聯華

lieqing (chaste love)

烈情

Lin Ching-Hsia, Brigitte

林青霞

Lin Tsui, Jeanette

林翠

Ling Pak-Hoi

寧北海

Lo Chen

羅臻

Love Without End

不了情

Lover’s Destiny

新啼笑姻缘

luandang (rebels or guerillas)

亂黨

luanshi fusheng (to live a floating/drifting life in turbulent times)

亂世浮生

Lunatics, The

癲佬正傳

ma (horse)

馬

Ma Qiuming

馬秋明

Mak, Michael

麥當傑

Manager Sung

宋經理

Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong)

毛澤東

Master Q

老夫子

Materials on Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature

鴛鴦蝴蝶派文學資料

maxi (circus routines)

馬戲

Media Asia

寰亞

meinü (beautiful girl)

美女

Mingxing Film Studio

明星



glossary 207

minquan zhuyi (the principle of people’s power or democracy)

民權主義

Minsheng Press, or People’s Voice Press

民聲出版社

minsheng zhuyi (the principle of people’s livelihood)

民生主義

minzu zhuyi (the principle of ethnic nationalism) 民族主義 雷懋 Motion Picture and General Investment (MP & GI) Mountain and Dangerous Encounters—1st Kind 第一類型危險 Mr. Kam

金老板

Mu Guiying

穆桂英

Mu Guiying Seeks a Groom

穆桂英招親

Nanking, a.k.a. Nanjing

南京

Nanyang

南洋

Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) Once Upon a Time in China

讓愛與和平佔領中環 (和平佔中) 黃飛鴻

Once Upon a Time in China and America

黃飛鴻之西域雄獅

Once Upon a Time in China II

黃飛鴻之二男兒當自強

Once Upon a Time in China III

黃飛鴻之三獅王爭霸

Once Upon a Time in China IV

黃飛鴻之四王者之風

Once Upon a Time in China V

黃飛鴻之五龍城殲霸

Pan Renmei

潘仁美

Pat Neil

白妞

Peiping, a.k.a. Peking or Beijing Peking opera (Beijing opera)

北平, a.k.a. 北京 京劇

Peking Opera Blues (Dao Ma Dan)

刀馬旦

Poon Hang-Sang

潘恆生

putian tongqing

普天同慶

Putonghua (Common Language)

普通話

qinggong (a type of superhuman martial skill)

輕功

qingyi (female role-types, usually a married commoner)

青衣

208

glossary

Qiong Yao

瓊瑤

Red Dust

滾滾紅塵

ren xin (human heart)

人心

Research Materials on the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School

鴛鴦蝴蝶派研究資料

Restoration Society

光復會

Revive China Society

興中會

Ruan Lingyu

阮玲玉

San Cha Kou

三岔口

san ge nüren yi tai xi (literally three women, one show-time), or in any gathering of three women, drama is bound to happen.

三個女人一台戲

Sanmin zhuyi (the three principles of the people) 三民主義 學民思潮 Scholarism Seven Swords

七劍

Shanghai Blues

上海之夜

Shanghai Film Studio

上海制片

Shaw Brothers

邵氏兄弟

shehui xiaoshuo (social novel)

社會小說

shenqi (supernatural) Shen Shaohua

神奇 沈韶華

Shen Fengxi

沈鳳喜

sheng (male role-types)

生

Sheung Hung

湘紅

Shi Youyu

石友宇

shidai yingxiong (the hero of an era)

時代英雄

Shin Gei-Yin, Stephen

冼杞然

Sil-Metropole

銀都機構有限公司

Siqin Gaowa

斯琴高娃

Song Jiaoren

宋教仁

Soong Sisters, The

宋家皇朝



glossary 209

State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT)

國家新聞出版廣電總局

Street Angels

馬路天使

Su Yanan

蘇亞南

Sun Jing

孫敬

Sun Moon and Star

星星月亮太陽

Sun Yat-sen Swordsman II

孫逸仙, a.k.a. 孫中山 笑傲江湖II：東方不敗

Swordsman III: The East is Red

東方不敗之風雲再起

Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D, The

智取威虎山

Tam, Patrick

譚家明

Three Modern Girls

三個摩登女性

Tian Han

田漢

Tien Ching

田青

Tiger Killer

武松

Tixiao yinyuan (Fate in tears and laughters)

啼笑姻緣

To Kwok-Wai, Raymond

杜國威

To, Johnnie

杜琪峰

Tsai Gai-Gwong, Clifford

蔡繼光

Tsai Ming-liang

蔡明亮

Tsang, Kenneth

曾江

Tsao Wan

曹雲

Tsui Hark (a.k.a. Xu Ke)

徐克

Tung Man

董民

Two Stage Sisters

舞台姐妹

Tyrant-King Bids Farewell to Concubine

霸王別姬

Umetsugu Inoue

井上梅次

Vermilion Door

紅伶淚

Wai Kai-San, Vincent

韋啟新

Wang Tianlin

王天林

Wang Ying

王引

210

glossary

Wanna Hide but Can’t Dodge

躲也躲不了

Warlord Liu

劉大帥

Warlord Tsao, or General Tsao

曹督軍

Warlord Tun

段軍閥

We Are Going to Eat You

地獄無門

wen (civil or literary)

文

wenyi zhi dao (literature as the embodiment of dao for moral instructions)

文藝之道

wendan (literary or civil lady)

文旦

Wenxi (civil play)

文戲

Wild, Wild Rose, The

夜玫瑰之戀

Wong Fei Hong

黃飛鴻新傳

Wong, Joshua

黃之鋒

Woo, John

吳宇森

wu (martial or military)

武

Wu, David

胡大為

Wo Ma

午馬

wudan (female warrior role-type; usually a commoner, bandit, or spirit)

武旦

wuxia xiaoshuo

武俠小說

wuxi (military or martial-type shows)

武戲

xi (plays)

戲

Xiang Yu

項羽

xianggong (husband or male lover)

相公

xiao (filial piety)

孝

xiaosheng (young male role-types)

小生

Xie Jin

謝晉

xifa (magic shows)

戲法

xiju (opera)

戲劇

xiju fangshi (dramatization)

戲劇方式

xishi zhentan xiaoshuo (Western-style novels)

西式偵探小說



glossary 211

xin xin xiangyin (heart-to-heart)

心心相印

Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society)

興中會

Xinwen Bao (News Paper)

新聞報

xiyang yingxi (Western shadowplay)

西洋影戲

Xu Hu

徐虎

Xu Jianbai

徐堅白

Xu Shu

徐速

Xu Wenguang

徐文光

Xu Zhenya

俆枕亞

yanzhi (poetic reflection)

言志

yang (foreign)

洋

Yang Gongliang

楊工良

Yang Yanzhao

楊延昭

Yang, Edward

楊德昌

Yau Lai-to, Herman

邱禮濤

Yee Tung-Sing, Derek

爾冬升

Yeh Chian-Wen, Sally

葉蒨文

Yeh Fung, Julie

葉楓

Yeung Choi-Nei, Charlie

楊采妮

yi (righteousness)

義

Yi Hua Film Studio

藝華

Yi Wen

易文

yizi (the number one)

一字

yizima (doing the split)

一字馬

Yim Ho

嚴浩

Yin Cheng Film Studio

銀城

Yin Haiqing

尹海清

Yingxi (shadow play)

影戲

yingxiong (heroes)

英雄

Yong Feng Film Studio

永豐

You Min, Lucilla

尤敏

212

glossary

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon

狄仁傑之神都龍王

youxi (amusing play)

遊戲

Yu Yu

虞玉

Yuan Muzhi

袁牧之

Yuan Shikau

袁世凱

Yuen Wing-Yee, Anita

袁詠儀

yuanqing (wronged love)

冤情

yuanyang hudie (mandarin duck and butterfly)

鴛鴦蝴蝶

Yueh Feng

岳楓

yule (entertainment)

娛樂

Zhang Henshui

張恨水

Zhang Shichuan

張石川

Zhang Yang

張揚

Zhang Yu

張榆

Zhang Yuqi

張雨綺

Zhao Hong

趙紅

Zhao Wenzhuo

趙文卓

Zhao Ziyang

趙紫陽

zhengdan (main protagonist)

正旦

zhong (loyalty)

忠

Zhongguo Tongmenhui (United League or Revolutionary Alliance)

中國同盟會

Zhongshan

中山

Zhou Shuzhen

周淑貞

Zhou Xun

周迅

Zhuge Liang

諸葛亮

Zhu Lan (a.k.a. A-Lan)

朱蘭 (a.k.a. 阿蘭) 自由戀愛

ziyou lian’ai (to have free choice in love, or free love) Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

新蜀山劍俠

zui zhide yikan (that which is most worth watching)

最值得一看

Filmography

Barbareschi, Luca, director. Something Good. Italy: Casanova Multimedia, 2013. Bertolucci, Bernardo, director. The Last Emperor. USA/China/Italy: Recorded Picture, Hemdale Film, Yanco Films, 1987. Bu, Wancang, director. Three Modern Girls. Shanghai: Lianhua, 1933. Chen, Andrew Wei-Wen, director. A Chinese Ghost Story—the Tsui Hark Animation. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 1997. Cheung, Mabel Yuen-Ting, director. An Autumn’s Tale. Hong Kong: D & B Films, 1987. ———. The Soong Sisters. Hong Kong: Golden Harvest, 1998. Chin, Wellson Sing-Wai, director. The Era of Vampires. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 2002. Ching, Tony Siu-Tung, director. A Chinese Ghost Story. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Cinema City, 1987. ———. A Chinese Ghost Story II. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 1990. ———. A Chinese Ghost Story III. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Golden Princess, 1991. ———. Swordsman II. Hong Kong: Long Shong Pictures, Golden Princess Film and Film Workshop, 1992. Ching, Tony Siu-Tung, and Johnnie To Kei-Fung, directors. Executioners.

214

filmography

Hong Kong: China Entertainment Films and Paka Hill Film, 1993. Choi, Clifford Gai-Gwong. Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1983. Chor, Yuan, director. Lover’s Destiny. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1975. Doe, Chin, director. Love Without End. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1961. Hung, Sammo Kam-Bo and Lau Kar-Wing, directors. Once Upon a Time in China and America. Hong Kong: Win’s Entertainment, 1997. Kane, Adam, director. Formosa Betrayed. USA: Formosa Films, 2009. Kwan, Stanley Kam-Pang, director. Full Moon in New York. Hong Kong: Gam Choi Film and Shiobu Film, 1990. Lee, Han-hsiang, director. Tiger Killer. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1982. Lee, Raymond Wai-Man, and Tony Ching Siu-Tung, directors. Swordsman III: The East is Red. Hong Kong: Long Shong Pictures, Golden Princess Film and Film Workshop, 1993. Li, Chenfeng, director. A Fate of Tears and Laughter, a.k.a. Unhappy Marriage [Tixiao yinyuan]. Hong Kong: Huaqiao Film, 1957. ———. Jade Pear Spirit, a.k.a. Forever Lily. Hong Kong: Yongfeng Film, 1953. Liang, Roseanne, director. My Wedding and Other Secrets. New Zealand: South Pacific Pictures, 2011. Lo, Chen, director. Vermilion Door. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1965. Mak, Michael, director. Moon Star and Sun. Hong Kong: Media Asia, 1988. Marshall, Rob, director. Memoirs of a Geisha. USA: Columbia Pictures, 2005. Shi, Youyu, and Li Lianqia, directors. Jade Pear Spirit. Hong Kong: Da Guan Film, 1939. Shin, Stephen Gei-Yin, director. Eclipse. Hong Kong: Sil-Metropole, 1982. To, Johnnie Kei-Fung, director. The Heroic Trio. Hong Kong: Paka Hill Film and China Entertainment. Tsui, Hark, director. All About Women. Hong Kong/China: Film Workshop, J.A. Media and Dong Yang Huan Yu, 2008. ———. A Better Tomorrow III. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Cinema City, 1989. ———. Black Mask II: City of Masks. Hong Kong: China Star Entertainment, 2002. Tsui, Hark, director. The Butterfly Murders. Hong Kong, Seasonal Film, 1979.



filmography 215

———. Dangerous Encounters—1st Kind. Hong Kong: Fotocine Film, 1980–1981. ———. Double Team. USA: Mandalay Entertainment and Columbia Pictures, 1997 ———. Golden Dagger Romance. Hong Kong: CTV, 1978. ———. Green Snake. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Seasonal Film, 1993. ———. Knock Off. USA: Knock Films A.V.V. and Film Workshop, 1998. ———. The Legend of Zu. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and One Hundred Years of Film, 2001. ———. Once Upon a Time in China. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, Golden Harvest and Paragon Films, 1991. ———. Once Upon a Time in China II. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, Golden Harvest and Paragon Films, 1992. ———. Once Upon a Time in China III. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, Golden Harvest and Paragon Films, 1993. ———. Once Upon a Time in China V. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, Golden Harvest and Paragon Films, 1994. ———. Peking Opera Blues. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 1986. ———. Shanghai Blues. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 1984. ———. Seven Swords. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 2005. ———. The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D. Beijing: Bona Film, 2014. ———. We Are Going to Eat You. Hong Kong: Seasonal Film, 1980. ———. Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon. Beijing: Huayi Brothers, 2013. ———. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Hong Kong: Paragon Films and Golden Harvest, 1983. Tsui Hark, and John Woo, directors. A Better Tomorrow II. Hong Kong: Cinema City and Film Workshop, 1987. Umetsugu Inoue, director. Hong Kong Nocturne. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1967 Wang, Tianlin, director. The Story of Three Loves. Hong Kong: MP & GI, 1963. ———. The Wild, Wild Rose. Hong Kong: MP & GI, 1960. Wang, Wayne, director. Joy Luck Club. USA/China: Hollywood Pictures and China Film Co-Production Corporation, 1993.

216

filmography

Wise, Robert, director. Sand Pebbles. USA: Robert Wise Productions and Twentieth Century Fox Film, 1966. Woo, John, director. A Better Tomorrow. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Cinema City, 1986. ———. The Killer. Hong Kong: Film Workshop and Golden Princess, 1989. Xie, Jin, director. Two Stage Sisters. Shanghai: Shanghai Film, 1965. Yang, Gongliang and Yin Haiqing, directors. A Story of Three Lovers. Hong Kong: Yin Cheng Film, 1952. Yau, Herman Lai-To, director. Master Q 2001. Hong Kong: China Star Entertainment, One Hundred of Years of Film, Film Workshop, 2001. Yee, Derek Tung-Sing, director. C’est La Vie, Mon Cherie. Hong Kong: Film Unlimited, 1993. Yeung, Charlie Choi-Nei, director. Christmas Rose. Hong Kong: Bona Film, 2013. Yi, Wen, director. Sun Moon and Star. Hong Kong: MP & GI, 1960. Yim, Ho, director. Red Dust. Hong Kong: Tomson Film and Pineast Pictures, 1990. Yuan, Muzhi, director. Street Angels. Shanghai: Mingxing, 1935. Yueh, Feng, director. Between Tears and Smiles. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1964. Yuen, Bun, director. Once Upon a Time in China IV. Hong Kong: Film Workshop, Golden Harvest and Paragon Films, 1993. Zhang, Shichuan, director. Tixiao yinyuan [Fate in tears and laughters]. Shanghai: Mingxing, 1932. Zhang, Shichuan, and Xu Hu, directors. Jade Pear Spirit, aka The Death of Yuli. Shanghai: Mingxing, 1924. Zhang, Yimou, director. Ju Dou. China/Japan: China Film Co-Production Corporation and Tokuma Shoten, 1990.

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