Organizer: King Fai Tam, Trinity College
Chair: Ying Hu, University of California, Irvine
Discussant: James Hevia, North Carolina A & T University
Taking as their central concern the images of China in recent books and films, the papers of this panel revolve around the questions of representation and authenticity, and their relationship with a larger power structure, be it economic, cultural or political. Our shared premise is that no representational endeavor is innocent, being shaped as it invariably is by the intricate networks of relationships that are becoming increasingly international and cross cultural.
Each in their own way, the papers challenge the perception of China as static and monolithic, which, as it provides a convenient framework for the the presence of a "real" China, fails ultimately to account for the existence of multiple representations. While the juxtaposition of the works discussed in this panel will expose the fallacy of such a view, the individual papers further intimate the origins of multiple representations of China found in these works by putting them in specific contexts.
Several such contexts come to the surface: that, for example, of the readers/viewers for which these works are intended; sharp contrasts can be traced in similar material when the audience is conceived domestically or internationally, suggesting different implications in the conception of local versus relational identity, local versus global politics. Another context discussed in the papers is the generic conventions particular to the work in question (realistic, confessional convention of the memoir, avant garde versus Hollywood versus different generations of Chinese directors in the film industry). In that these works are situated across national borders, it cannot but further intensify the difficulties of presenting an authentic China.
In analyzing these cross cultural texts, examining the strategies of representation, the papers thus explore various ways of producing "China" today, a production of national identity that is becoming more and more conjunctural in this increasingly inter related world of ours.
King Fai Tam, Trinity College
This paper proposes to analyze as cross cultural texts a group of memoirs written in English by Chinese émigrés living in the West. Often assumed to be unembellished accounts of life under the communist regime in China, these memoirs are fast becoming an important source of information about China for those readers in the West who are untutored in the Chinese language. As such, these memoirs raise questions about both the way cross cultural texts are produced and read, and the object of cross cultural representation is constructed.
The memoirs under consideration will include, among others: Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Life and Death in Shanghai by Cheng Nien, and A Single Tear by Wu Ningkun.
While each of these memoirs has its unique moments, the overall picture of China contained in them as one of unrelieved suffering is curiously similar to each other. In all of them, the reader is given not only recurrent episodes of betrayal, violence and waste, but also a vision of history that ultimately serves to contain these episodes within a certain time frame of recent Chinese past. As a result, disturbing for the most part as these narratives are in exposing the cruelty of political persecutions, they almost invariably conclude with an optimistic note, promising a better future for the very country that the writers themselves have left behind. In this way, it is perhaps justifiable to speak of a master narrative which all these memoirs reenact. This paper will then conclude with an exploration of the characteristics of the master narrative in the light of the cross cultural context in which these memoirs appear.
Ying Hu, University of California, Irvine
This paper examines the problematic relationship between filmic production of "national/regional culture" and "the international market." It takes as a precondition that film, as a modern and a western medium, is necessarily inscribed in the global power (political/economic) systems. With the diaspora of the Fifth Generation after 1989, the series of questions from funding to distribution to marketing of the films became ever more internationally oriented. No longer is it possible for the directors or critics to imagine any Self that is "self sufficient," to use Mao's term, but a Self that is always imagined in relation to multiple others, produced vis-à-vis others, the seeing of the Self intricately tied up with seeing another seeing the Self.
The questions then are: how is local culture produced? How is it recognized as specifically Chinese, and recognized as a culture? Recognized by whom? A recognition (re knowing) based on what familiar past knowledge? reality? fantasy?
I examine two cases in Fifth Generation's effort of "auto ethnography," a term popular in the late 80's film circle in China: "Raise the Red Lanterns" (1989, d. Zhang Yimou), and "Bloody Morning" (1990, d. Li Shaohong). Both films are adaptations from literary works: Zhang's film from "Wives and Concubines" by Su Tong, Li's film from Garcia Marquez's "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." There is then concrete textual basis for the discussion of filmic choices, choices significant in our understanding of cultural production in an international framework. While Zhang decontextualizes history and ritualizes "Chinese Culture," Li presents change (including rituals) as the main feature of a culture (Columbian or Chinese). For both directors, gender appears as an organizing principle. However, Zhang presents the power/gender structure as rooted in Tradition, powerful, immutable, pleasurable; while for Li, "Culture" is everywhere problematized, sometimes shown in decay, discontinuous and porous, sometimes in a process of reinventing itself. Here, the very "inauthenticity" of a hybrid origin of the script is the ground on which to stage the improvisations of a Chinese culture in transition.
Wendy Larson, University of Oregon
This paper is a comparative study of selected films directed by Xie Fei and Zhang Yimou; these films offer a contrasting vision of how female beauty should be constructed and represented in film. While both authors make use of traditional dress and style in their heroine's clothes, the implications are different.
In most scenes, Xie Fei's actresses are garbed in extra ordinary clothes that speak to their working lives. When they dress up, it is either in traditional festival clothes, or in a self-conscious and (from the director's point of view) purposefully inauthentic westernized outfit. Zhang Yimou's actresses also dress in stunningly beautiful traditional clothes and ordinary work clothes common to rural women, but with a meaning directed toward the creation of a vulnerable, eroticized female position. Zhang accomplishes this through utilizing a trope common in contemporary films in many cultures: the battered or exhausted woman dressed in clothes that normally would cover her, but, because of her victimage, reveal and incite. Erotic desire and a special "international" female beauty must be represented over and over, and is the motivating strength behind change. In these films, men are powerful but inadequate in terms of recognizing the need for change and putting into effect the actions that would result in change.
Zhang straddles the image of a traditional woman and a modern "trapped" woman calling out to the audience for help. Xie Fei, however, constructs a thoroughly native vision of commonness and female beauty. In Xie Fei's films, women hold the means of reproducing traditional oppressive social practices, and yet also represent the national diligence working toward change. Men appear useless and frivolous, and possess only the power to gain their own very immediate self advancement. Erotics is scarcely represented, and is not the rationale of modernization. Women's ordinary and awkward dress speaks to their almost hidden and implicitly national strength.
Both directors view female beauty as a powerful incentive to either keep traditional oppressive practices in position, or to move toward change. Whereas Zhang's vision is internationalist and women are eroticized, Xie's is nativist and positions women in powerful national roles. Zhang's women die or are disabled, but Xie's women survive and continue, if under difficult and compromised conditions.
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