Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility

Rey Chow

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231508193
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization?

Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations —screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.

Part I

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

1

The Seductions of Homecoming

Temptress Moon and the Question of Origins

That sentiment accompanying the absence of home—homesickness—can cut two ways: it can be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it can be the recognition of the inauthenticity of all homes.

—ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE,

“Traveling Light: Of Immigration, Invisible Suitcases, and Gunny Sacks”

FIGURE 1.1 The image of the three children gazing at the audience at the end of Fengyue / Temptress Moon (Copyright Shanghai Film Studios / Tomsen Films [Hong Kong], 1996)

Even though it has been an overwhelmingly successful phenomenon worldwide since the late 1980s, contemporary Chinese cinema is habitually greeted by Chinese-speaking audiences with cynicism if not hostility. It is as if the accomplishments of this cinema have an impossible task in returning home. The simple fact that it has traveled abroad and been gazed at with enthusiasm by foreigners is apparently enough to cause it to lose trustworthiness as wholly and genuinely Chinese. This sentimental relation to what is firmly held as the boundary between the outside and the inside of a community and, with it, the imagined inviolable origin of a culture constitutes perhaps the single most thorny problem in the reception of this cinema among its native consumers, even as what is native itself has become an increasingly porous and unstable phenomenon.

For instance, the films of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, arguably the two most well-known contemporary directors from the People’s Republic, have continued to be attacked for their tendencies to pander to the tastes of Western audiences eager for the orientalized, exotic images of a China whose history they ignore, falsify, or misrepresent.¹ This problematic, with its impassioned insistence on what is authentic, is familiar to all those engaged in cross-cultural studies.² In the 1990s, when filmmaking and film watching were obviously global events involving ineluctable interactions with the foreign, how might a film come to terms with such insistence? Chen’s 1996 film Fengyue (Temptress Moon) is, I believe, highly instructive in this regard,³ perhaps not least because of the director’s own unresolved cultural complexes. A discussion of the film may begin with the significance of place in its narrative. Place, as I shall show, is not only the setting that helps shape characters in action; it is also the locus where, in specifically filmic terms, the notions of homecoming and originality unravel as questions rather than resolutions.

THE FLIGHT FROM HOME

Topographically, Temptress Moon shifts back and forth between the countryside of Jiangnan (the location of the wealthy Pang clan) and the metropolis of Shanghai, which was among the first Chinese cities to be opened to foreign trade in the mid-nineteenth century (under the Treaty of Nanking, signed between China and Britain as a result of the Opium War of 1839–42). In the film, visual and architectural details combine to convey the sharp differences between the two locations, respectively, as traditional native culture and fashionable foreign enclave. The Pang family house, situated by a river, is a well-endowed ancient estate with an air of unbreakable heritage and kinship order; the solemnity and reticence typical of tribal bondage find their expression in darkish interiors with austere, muted decor. Shanghai, by contrast, is a world of gaudy kaleidoscopic colors, loud and vibrant dance-hall music, fast-moving vehicles, and ruthless, mercenary human relations. Contrary to the mood of languid eternality that shrouds the old books, arcane utensils, and antique furnishings, as well as opium-smoking habits, of the Pang household, Shanghai’s living spaces are characterized by a much less permanent, because much newer, sense of time. In an apartment rented for the purpose of an illicit relationship, for instance, commodified Western artifacts such as a vase of roses, a rocking chair, a windowpane, a closet mirror, and the occasional music of a piano from afar all suggest the aura of a larger culture in the process of change. For the inhabitants of the countryside, meanwhile, everything from the port city, including clothes, shoes, hairstyles, and personal possessions such as pocket watches, slippers, razors, soaps, hats, and photographs, takes on the historic fascination of a progressive modernity—the legend, sign, and imprint that separates Shanghai from the rest of China’s hinterland.

It is in Shanghai that we meet the adult figure of the leading male character, Yu Zhongliang. Zhongliang is by profession a special kind of gigolo. A key member of a Shanghai mafia in the 1910s, Zhongliang’s work involves the seduction and blackmail of rich married women who are eager for amorous attention. Using the pseudonym Xiao Xie, Zhongliang would entice a woman into a secret affair; after the affair had gone on for a while, a typical scene was staged by the mafia: while Zhongliang was making love with the woman during one of their trysts, gangsters of the mafia would burst in on the scene, blindfold the woman, and threaten to report the affair to her husband unless the woman agreed to pay them a large sum of money. In the process, the woman would be told that her lover, Xiao Xie, was dead. After she was thus psychologically devastated, Zhongliang would leave quietly with his cohorts and move on to the next target.

Zhongliang’s professional success is the result of his familiarity with topography of another kind—a particular strategic spot on a woman’s body. Typically, as he gained intimacy with a woman, he would kiss her on one ear, nibbling at the ear until the earring came off. The earring, like Denis Diderot’s “bijoux indiscrets,” is therefore the site of a female sexual confession.⁴ For the mafia, this memento of a single earring exists as a repeated symbol of Zhongliang’s invincibility. Although every case of extortion is carried out with the announcement that Xiao Xie is dead, in the next shot Zhongliang is usually alive and well, speedily departing from the scene of destruction for the next scene of conquest. Zhongliang’s ease at the two subplaces that govern his life in Shanghai—married women’s earlobes and the boudoirs of clandestine affairs—makes him indispensable to the mafia. Dada (or Boss), the head of the mafia, openly speaks of Zhongliang as someone he cannot do without.

To the audience, however, the smoothness with which Zhongliang moves about in Shanghai carries a different set of connotations. When the film begins, years before his Shanghai career, Zhongliang has just arrived at the residence of the Pangs in the countryside of Jiangnan after both his parents have died. His only relative is his sister, Xiuyi, who is married to the young master Pang. Despite being officially the brother-in-law of the young master, Zhongliang is in effect treated like a servant. Between the lowly task of serving opium to his decrepit and perverse brother-in-law and the intimate, incestuous affection of his sister, the young boy is plunged into a confusing encounter with the adult world. The twin experiences of a cruel adult male and a desirous adult female culminate in a scene in which Zhongliang’s brother-in-law orders him to kiss his sister, who, sitting on the side of her bed, acquiesces smilingly by opening her arms to the boy. Fearful and reluctant, Zhongliang approaches the older woman while holding the opium-serving tray, his hands shaking violently. Amid the unforgettable sound of the opium utensils rattling against one another, his gaze arrests on one of Xiuyi’s earrings.

The place that is supposed to be a home for the displaced orphan child thus serves, in terms of narrative structure, as the unbearable site of infantile seduction (in the etymological sense of the word “infant” as in-fans, the state of speechlessness).⁵ Like many first encounters with sexuality, the meaning of his experience with the sadomasochistic relationship of the two adults eludes Zhongliang and leaves him speechless. Architecturally, the traumatic nature of this seduction is mirrored by the circular, labyrinthine structure of the Pang estate, where a seemingly infinite series of doors and chambers, each connected with and indistinguishable from the others, precludes any clear notion of entry or exit. Unable to comprehend (that is, to enter fully or leave fully behind) this primary encounter with sexuality, Zhongliang retains it through a certain repeated pattern of behavior. Having illicit relationships with married women that begin with the stealing of a single earring becomes his symptom and trademark, which turns a painful remembrance virtually into an industry. Although Zhongliang is a successful seducer, therefore, his success is presented from the beginning as a facade—a cover-up and a displacement of the uncomprehended trauma of his own seduction.

Meanwhile, there is another incident that makes it impossible for him to remain with the Pang family. Filled with resentment, he uses his opportunity of serving opium to poison his brother-in-law with a dose of arsenic, which causes the man to become brain-dead. Fearing that his murderous act will be discovered, Zhongliang escapes. This escape clarifies the teleological tendency of the narrative of Temptress Moon. As an adopted home for Zhongliang, the backward, decadent countryside of the Pangs is significant as the site of a sexual primal scene that has shaped his character negatively: in order to be, Zhongliang must leave. His existential autonomy, in other words, has to be established as a flight from the shock that is supposedly home—but where will he flee from there?

Zhongliang intends to head for Beijing, the site of the historic, student-led May Fourth Movement of 1919, which sought, among other things, to revolutionize and modernize the Chinese written language, literature, and culture. To make sure that the audience does not miss this point, Chen Kaige inserts a scene in which Zhongliang, like other passengers, is hurrying along the railway, shouting: “Is this the train to Beijing?” Crucially, this intention is intercepted when Zhongliang, robbed of his luggage before boarding the train, is picked up by Dada’s gangsters and transported to Shanghai instead. Rather than Beijing, the enlightened capital city of modern China, in which he might have been able to receive a proper education, Zhongliang is literally abducted into a new home, the depraved underground world of Shanghai, where he soon emerges as the favorite son. He is so at home in this corrupt, commercial city that Dada, who may be regarded as Zhongliang’s adopted father, says to him: “You belong to Shanghai; Shanghai cannot do without you.”⁶

The escape from “home” leads not to liberation and enlightenment but rather to another type of entrapment. In the decadence of Shanghai, Zhongliang remains enslaved to an autocratic, violent, and immoral patriarchal community. His two masters, the poisonous Pangs in the countryside and the poisonous mafia in the metropolis, echo each other in the control they exert over him, and his life in Shanghai, despite its glamour and success, becomes a symmetrical double to his life in Jiangnan. One may even go so far as to say that, in fact, it is precisely as he becomes existentially autonomous and acquires agency as an adult human being that the shadow of the past begins to loom the darkest. He may have physically left “home,” but psychically “home” has never left him.

This unfinished relationship with home is evident, for instance, in Zhongliang’s affair with a nameless woman. In one scene, in which he is waiting for her in her apartment on Tianxiangli (Heavenly Lane) in Shanghai, we as well as he are transported by hallucinatory images from his current surroundings back to his former home: first, the woman’s picture, which bears a striking resemblance to Xiuyi; then, a flashback to the scene of Zhongliang’s childhood seduction; finally, the woman herself appearing, putting her hands over Zhongliang’s eyes from behind—a gesture that once again reminds us of the games Xiuyi used to play with her younger brother. This attachment to a figure who visually conjures the past constitutes an obstacle in Zhongliang’s job: despite Dada’s urging, Zhongliang is unable to bring himself to destroy this woman. He tries to delay her destruction by prolonging their relationship. In this postponement, this reluctance to execute, we recognize the prelude to his ultimate return home.

THE HOME COMING … AS YOU WISH

Dada’s new target is Pang Ruyi, Xiuyi’s sister-in-law, whom he wants Zhongliang to seduce. After Xiuyi’s husband becomes brain-dead and leaves the clan without a male to succeed the old master, the Pang elders decide to appoint Ruyi as the head of the clan. Since Ruyi is female, they also appoint Duanwu, Ruyi’s younger cousin from a poor, distant branch of the family, as her male companion.

Upon receiving instructions for his new task, Zhongliang’s first reaction is a firm refusal: “As you know,” he says to Dada, “I will never go to the town of the Pangs.” The next thing we know, he is there against his conscious will.

Strictly speaking, Ruyi is merely the latest in Zhongliang’s series of targets, but what distinguishes her from the other women is precisely her topographical location. The fact that this wealthy and powerful woman lives in his former home means that his seduction of her is inevitably commingled with a fateful revisiting of the scene of his own seduction. In the course of the film, we are made to understand that Ruyi is topographically distinctive in another sense. Unlike the women in Shanghai, Ruyi is a virgin, a “place” yet untouched by the rest of the world because, having been raised in an opium-filled house, she remains unwanted by most families looking for a prospective daughter-in-law. Despite her poisonous history, moreover, Ruyi comes across as a beautiful person with a refreshing, untainted sense of personal integrity.

Like her name, which means “as you wish,” Ruyi likes to act according to her own wishes, which are, contrary to her conservative upbringing, entirely independent and liberatory. After becoming the head of the clan, for instance, she orders the retirement of her father’s concubines, much to the anger of the clan elders. Then, after meeting Zhongliang, she is direct in her expression of interest in him: one day, she even asks him to teach her how to ride a bicycle. This occasion gives Zhongliang the opportunity to become intimate with her, but when he kisses her on the ear and comes away as usual with one of the earrings, Ruyi reacts by taking off the other earring and offering it to him as well. This unusual event, which epitomizes Ruyi’s difference from all the other women Zhongliang has conquered, does not escape the notice of his cohort, who asks: “How come there are two earrings this time?”

If the possession of the single earring is Zhongliang’s means of surviving the trauma of an illicit sexual experience, which he does not understand and must thus compulsively keep repeating—through the screening work of fetishization and continual repression—in order to attain a false sense of equilibrium, this equilibrium is now disturbed by the voluntary gift of the other earring by an unsuspecting Ruyi. By giving him the other earring, Ruyi offers Zhongliang something he had never found at home—a love that does not carry with it the connotations of enslavement, illicitness, and humiliation. As such, Ruyi’s boldness and spontaneity stand as a force that has the potential of pulling Zhongliang out of the stupor that is his entire existence so far. Through this “virgin territory” that is the independent-minded woman at home, Zhongliang could have found redemption. Yet, in spite of this, he remains unmoved. In a scene following the offer of the second earring, we find him displaying disgust at Ruyi, who, being in love, has secretly gone into his room to look at his belongings. Instead of reciprocating her attention, Zhongliang merely feels resentful and loses his temper. Accusing her of a lack of respect for his privacy, he reminds her bitterly of the class hierarchy that used to separate them—that he was, at one time, a servant at her house.

THE SEDUCTION OF THE SEDUCED

The strong, innocent woman who offers him true love thus remains, topographically, a goal Zhongliang has the potential of reaching but somehow misses. Instead, he continues to aim consciously at the Ruy...