Written on Water, page 11
When a husband goes out on the town to philander, does a wife have the right to follow his example? Modern girls quite openly denounce one-sided notions of marital fidelity. Neither is this question unfamiliar to Chinese wives of a more traditional sort. Provoked by some trivial matter to jealousy, they may threaten to take revenge by these very means, but whatever serious threats they may issue are taken half in jest by their husbands.
In a bantering and unreflective mood, men might even acknowledge a certain primitive justice in their wives’ declarations of independence. It is very difficult to persuade a Chinese man to discuss this topic with a straight face, because he considers nothing more hilarious than adultery. But if we could force him to consider the proposition, he would surely veto it. From a purely logical standpoint, two blacks do not make a white and two wrongs do not make a right. But Chinese men have no use for logic such as this in arriving at their conclusions, because they realize that for a wife to carry out such a threat would not only be impractical but also disadvantageous to her. She might have the right in theory, but some rights are better left unused.
This wisdom notwithstanding, questions of this nature are apparently just the thing for enlivening after dinner repartee in mixed company. In The Song of Meiniang, a married women volubly defends her presence in an ill-famed establishment in a manner reminiscent of a formal speech at a banquet. Even so, our innocent heroine has never even dreamed of such a right, let alone the notion of rights as such. Drawn into these dubious environs under false pretenses by a man who has convinced her that he is the founder of a new charity school and that he would like her to be the principal, she is immediately discovered by her husband, and the fatal misunderstanding ensues. She never has a chance to consider whether she has a right to commit an offense, cast as she is into the abyss before even reaching the rim of the question.
In The Struggle for Spring, the husband does not succumb to temptation until he has been filled to the gills with alcohol, and he regrets it afterward, which seems to make his act forgivable. But only the audience is aware of these mitigating circumstances. His wife never knows and never concerns herself with such questions, for it seems that she lacks even the slightest bit of curiosity. All that interests her is holding on to that fraction of him that still falls to her: in the event of his untimely death, the part of him that survives in his child, even if it is a child by another woman.
Although The Struggle for Spring was adapted from an American film called The Great Lie, it remains close to the Chinese heart. This virtuous wife—who undergoes all manner of suffering and unpleasantness to protect the fetus growing inside the belly of her husband’s mistress and even stops her from having an abortion—is fundamentally Oriental in spirit, because of our deeply grounded traditional emphasis on the importance of preserving the family line.
In today’s China, amid the intermingling of new and old currents of thought, Western individualism is at a considerable advantage, so the continued existence of such models of feminine propriety, if they indeed exist, are in need of explanation. Even against the backdrop of the strict moralism of ancient times, this tangled psychological complex, with its excessive emphasis on self-sacrifice merits close scrutiny. Unfortunately, The Struggle for Spring is too superficial by half, seeing no call for explanation of the inner lives of either the wife or the mistress and taking all these questions basically for granted. The airy narrative style of director Li Pingqian is as winning as ever. Particularly gratifying to male audiences is the scene in which the wife and mistress sleep nestled in each other’s arms, in perfect harmony and tender accord.
With a story as interesting as this one, The Struggle for Spring could easily have served as a sidelight to several momentous social issues. But this opportunity is passed over in silence. The Song of Meiniang is the same. Blissfully unaware of its progressive potential, it meanders insubstantially through familiar territory: the tragedy of the abandoned wife. Meiniang is rushed from clichéd situation to clichéd situation, like a celebrity starlet hopping from one banquet to another. She stumbles in a rainstorm, kisses her child through a windowpane, gasps for breath in a thatched hovel, dies at long last in the arms of her repentant husband, and sings a love song to him on a lake in a final flashback of their life together. The film has every tried-and-true element of a successful romantic drama, but the remarkably poor lighting seriously detracts from the effect.
In part because of the awful deficiency of the lighting, even the scenes of revelry look remarkably cold and bleak. The performance of Ma Ji, playing the madam of the brothel, suffers from the monotony of her sharp, cloying, and artificial laughter. Yan Jun, known for his villains, is fluent and effective in a straight role. Wang Xichun is not yet able to cast off completely the restrictions imposed on her by her training in Peking opera, while Zang Yinqiu steals several scenes with a brilliantly satirical portrait of an elementary school principal—the scenes that one can make out in spite of the poor lighting.
Nancy Chen tends toward the schoolgirlishly effusive in her portrayal of the heroic wife in The Struggle for Spring.2 Bai Guang is limited by her lines and comes off as an unusually earnest vamp as she thrusts her glass at us over and over again, always with the same admonition: “Drink up! Drink up!”3 She attempts to break up the monotony with flashes from her lovely eyes, but even though she is such an expert “optometrist,” these efforts seem somewhat forced.
LET’S GO! LET’S GO UPSTAIRS
I wrote a play in which a destitute man throws himself and his entire family on the mercy of their relatives. When a quarrel erupts, he leaps indignantly up with the exclamation: “I can’t take any more of this. Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” Mournfully, his wife interjects: “But where are we to go?” He gathers his wife and children around him and says: “Let’s go! Let’s go upstairs.” At dinnertime, when it is announced that food is on the table, they come back down again.
Chinese people have learned how to leave home from Nora in A Doll’s House.1 There can be no doubt that this stylishly bleak gesture has left an extremely deep impression on a generation of Chinese youth. In the personal ads in the newspapers, bulletins for missing persons like the following appear in shocking quantity: “Since you left at nine o’clock at night on the 12th without saying goodbye, Grandma is confined to bed, Mother has had a relapse, and the faces of the whole family are awash in tears. Hurry back as soon as you see this.” Leaving is one thing, but the question remains: what kind of escape counts as “braving the storm and weathering the elements,” and which kind is just “going upstairs”? The conventional wisdom seems to hold that a woman who is a “flower vase” (pretty to look at but empty inside) has “gone upstairs,” housewives have “gone upstairs,” dreaming is “going upstairs,” remaking the American film Rebecca is “going upstairs,” copying from other books is “going upstairs,” collecting antique coins is “going upstairs” (collecting modern currency counts as going downstairs), but there is in fact no single formula for making such determinations. The advantage of reality is that exceptions are so plentiful, and each individual case needs to be analyzed on its own terms. Actually, just moving from the back of the building to the front for a breath of fresh air and opening the window for a change of scenery can be quite nice. In any case, there’s plenty of food for thought in all this, which is why I like that scene in my play.
There is, however, nothing else to recommend it, except that it’s quite cheerful. There’s grief, vexation, and acrimony, but it’s cheerful vexation and cheerful acrimony. And another thing: at the very least, it’s a play for Chinese people—loud and lively and fun for ordinary folk. If it were playing at a theater now, I would find a way to persuade you to go and see it. But I don’t know when I’ll ever get it produced. I suppose it may be too early to start advertising now. Because when the time comes—if there is a time—people might have already forgotten all about it, and the ads would be lost on them.
I wrote the play before the Lunar New Year and brought it over to Mr. Ke Ling so that he could have a look at it.2 The structure of the thing was far too diffuse, and the last act unusable. I am grateful for Ke Ling’s guidance. After several rounds of revision, the play was really much improved. But when it was finally done, I was left at a loss. They say there is a serious drought of scripts at the moment. Maybe there really aren’t any scripts around, at least not the ones Cao Yu hasn’t found time to write yet.3 No one seems to have any use for scripts by people who’ve yet to make a name for themselves. I don’t necessarily think that there’s a monopoly, merely that the walls are fortified and the gates closely guarded. You would think that bringing a copy of a script round to the managers of the various theatrical troupes, as I did, would be the proper way to have your work recognized, but I am told that this route is impracticable here in China, where playwrights can only approach potential producers through the good offices of a go-between. I honestly don’t know how to proceed.
Printing a copy of the script in order to capture their attention might be an option. But, to put it crassly, what happens if someone simply slips my play right into his own? I may sound ludicrously petty here, and perhaps overly generous in my self-estimation, but I could hardly be expected not to “measure the heart of the gentleman with the mind of a knave.” Someone who’s enamored of his own words and thoughts often tends to be possessive—which seems perfectly natural, really. I still remember the first time I saw the sea in Hong Kong: the lifeless, artificial shade of blue reminded me of the ocean on a retouched color postcard. Later, I stumbled across much the same metaphor in an English book: “You could cut out the Persian Gulf and send it home as a postcard, the blue of the water was so deep and so dull.” The discovery that someone else has long ago given voice to your own words, and said them much better than you ever could, is disconcerting enough. But to discover that he didn’t say it as well as you might have done is heartbreaking.
That’s one aspect. What’s more, plays are meant to be performed, not read. In writing a play, a dramatist must always hope that the actors will be able to breathe life into the work onstage. People always think that when fiction writers write plays, they are better read than seen. How should I overcome this presumption?
Writing essays is a relatively simple affair; one’s ideas reach the reader directly through the medium of movable type. Writing drama is another matter altogether, because the original work soon becomes entangled in all sorts of complex forces that I am unable really to understand. The more I think about the complications of finding a trustworthy director and group of performers, not to mention “the proper time, the proper place, and the proper spirit,” the more my head spins.
In buildings along the street, the lower stories are liable to be a little noisy. But surely that’s no reason to flee upstairs?
Drama.
(1) A demon;
(2) Greta Garbo;
(3) a female martyr, on her way either to commit suicide or to marry a revolutionary;
(4) a tragic heroine;
(5) heroes and beauties, a love triangle or quadrangle.
Good Women.
(1) Teachers and students of a convent school;
(2) a married lady; the pillar of society, she herself becomes a system, representing rules, regulations, social integrity, and proper customs.
SCHOOLING AT THE SILVER PALACE
Not long ago, I saw two highly educational films, New Life and The Fisher Girl.1 (The latter does not necessarily fit neatly into the category of educational film, but it may well contribute to our understanding of the attitudes of Chinese people toward education.) Having benefited from their instruction, I cannot help writing out some of what I learned for everyone’s reference.
New Life deals with the demoralization of rural innocence in the big city—a timeless phenomenon. Three Modern Girls and Humanity, two films from seven or eight years ago, also covered similar themes, and like New Life they showed a country boy studying in the metropolis as a typical example. Chinese films at present show a tendency to excavate favored topics from the films of the 1930s. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 1930s was a period of intellectual vigor, despite its touchiness, its bigotry, and the annoying monotony of its grandiloquent Western-style “examination essays.” The anxious and haphazard mood of that era has passed us by, but some of the more valuable of its literary and cinematic themes have survived.
Although New Life is designed to “expound the spirit of education and guide the young away from temptation”—to quote the advertisements—the filmmakers seemed to have been distrustful of the degree to which audiences would interest themselves in this mission. They have compromised by exaggerating the “temptations” and doing their best to simplify the “guidance.” You can’t really blame them, and there are precedents for such an approach. In America, religious sects known as Revivalists hold public confessionals after Sunday services in which people expound at great length on their own past sins. The speaker describes his life of villainy and debauchery; the worse the sins, the better the story, and the clearer the contrast with one’s present virtue and the happiness of having been saved. In the backward and out-of-the-way American hamlets where such practices are common, they don’t have cabarets with leggy chorines; these vivid, earthy, and joyous stories of repentance are the only source of amusement.
New Life cannot pretend to that quality of vividness. It lacks a sense of reality, in part because of sheer economics. It’s not that the producers weren’t willing to spend enough money. The problem is that the film itself seems muddled about what things really cost. With the six hundred dollars his parents have given him for books, this unfilial son somehow contrives to live in luxury in a semidetached mansion with servants, perpetual parties, and a steady stream of girlfriends to keep him entertained. A gold-digging society girl agrees to marry him on the condition that he produce the vast sum of two thousand dollars for the marriage. These would have been fabulously optimistic calculations even by the standards of ten years ago.
The male protagonist turns over a new leaf and reforms himself; but of what exactly does his remarkable reformation consist? New Life makes a courageous if rather messy attempt to grapple with this question. To be fair, it is specific on this score, whereas earlier films of its ilk provide only a vague feeling of renewal not unlike that of a New Year’s resolution. New Life introduces us to the most ideal of all modern girls (played by Wang Danfeng), who befriends the hero for the sole purpose of providing mutual assistance in the arduous course of their studies. When he wants to take the relationship a step further, she refuses his love on the grounds that the times will no longer allow for frivolities such as romance. After graduation, she moves to a school in the interior to take up a position as an extremely decorative dean of students, with a big butterfly bow in her hair. Moved by her example, the protagonist joins a group of colonists who venture forth to reclaim the barren wastes of the borderlands. This move is completely unpremeditated and seems to be prompted by momentary inspiration, a poetic longing, or some impulse bordering on escapism. Why is it that he cannot redeem his sins in the same place in which they were committed? Are there no useful tasks for a strong, capable, and well-educated young man to undertake in our immediate surroundings? To insist that he travel to a “land far, far away” seems distinctly unpragmatic.
New Life also puts forward another proposition meriting serious discussion: is elementary education for the masses a more pressing need than advanced studies for the privileged few? The protagonist’s father refuses to help a neighbor’s child through primary school because he needs to save every penny to be able to afford to send his own son to college. Disappointed by his son’s misdemeanors, however, he turns away from his own family and sets up a school for the benefit of the children of the entire village. Here, we may note an as-yet-veiled disapproval of the modern university on the part of the filmmakers, which emerges even more clearly in an attack on the contaminating miasma of corruption enveloping such institutions.
If we want to see a treatise on the meaning of education in The Fisher Girl, we run into a dead end, because the film has chosen an art student as its hero. Western art in China has from the very start been a plaything of leisured dilettantes. Almost all professional painters work in traditional Chinese styles. The hero immediately alienates his audience (at least any audience with a modicum of sense) when he naively imagines it possible to earn a living for himself and his family by painting two rather awe-inspiringly towering nudes.
The maker of The Fisher Girl has presumably never seen a live fish, except for the kind that swims inside a bowl, but he tells the story with a rare sweetness and facility. There are some truly remarkable touches that, whether wittingly or not, illuminate the Chinese nature. For example, when the fisher girl apologizes to the art student for being unworthy of his lofty attentions, he replies, with some heat: “I don’t like educated women.” And yet, despite his Rousseauesque admiration for this child of nature, he cannot resist the temptation to teach her Chinese characters. In the past, Chinese scholars cultivated just such a hobby, teaching their concubines to read. Actually, to teach one’s wife to read was acceptable as well, as long as she was pretty, but this sort of charming and elegant romantic occupation was normally reserved for later in one’s life. In the leisurely days of retired life, a scholar could take on a “red-sleeved” young thing as a disciple to add savor to his sunset years. For these particular purposes, a regular wife would clearly be unsuitable.
