The Iron Women of Chinese Cinema

Made in Taiwan, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the top-grossing subtitled film ever, is the first Chinese drama to cross over into North American theaters and become a bona-fide mainstream hit, garnering ten Academy Award nominations and winning four (Best Foreign Film, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score). Perhaps not coincidentally, three of the four major characters in this genre-bending action-drama are women: strong characters who carry both the plot and the action.

Lee, who also directed The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility in the West, first made his mark in Taiwan with the wildly entertaining family comedy, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. In this masterful romp, Mr. Chu is a widowed chef whose three beautiful daughters are victims—and beneficiaries—of the rapid changes in Chinese culture. A generation earlier Mr. Chu would have married the girls off, probably at great cost. Now, one is a successful airline executive, another is a teacher, and the youngest a struggling waitress.

Mr. Chu is a gruff old duffer who loves his daughters even as he drives them crazy. When he falls in love with a younger woman, he is drawn to her partly becuase of his grandfatherly relationship with her little daughter, Shan-Shan. In one of the film’s subplots, we see Chu, the great chef, trundling exotic lunches to the primary school for Shan-Shan, whose divorced mother is a wretched cook. Soon Shan-Shan is taking orders for the entire class, and Chu is happily (and secretly) feeding them.

What is remarkable about Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is Lee’s deft parsing of subtle contradictions in Chinese culture. For centuries, China’s girls and women have been undervalued. In the communist era, the one-child policy has encouraged infanticide and selective abortion of females, creating a staggering gender imbalance. Yet the role of women in China has always been more complex than that of passive victim, and the best recent Chinese films—Lee’s among them—feature strong female protagonists, girls and women of great strength, resourcefulness, and courage.

Some of these strong women are cast in hopeless situations. Zhang Yimou is the acknowledged master of the current Chinese cinema, and his collaborations with the electrifying Gong Li stand among the finest films of our time, visually stunning and almost Shakespearean in conception. In Ju Dou, Gong Li plays the young wife of a cruel elderly mill owner. When the film was made, a decade ago, China’s gerontocracy saw it as a veiled attack on their rule, and Ju Dou was subsequently banned. In Raise the Red Lantern, Gong is a university student whose father has died and left her penniless. She reluctantly becomes the fourth wife of a rich man, who plays his wives against one another in a cruel game of manipulation. The master holds all the power. The women, unable to strike a blow against their oppressor, are reduced to fighting among themselves. We never see the master’s face, except in shadow. Once again, China’s aging communist rulers saw a reflection of themselves and banned the film.

Zhang’s most recent international release, Not One Less (1999), again features a strong female protagonist, but this time the scenario offers a bit of hope. Not One Less is Zhang’s most visually simple film, and the actors—most of them children—are largely untrained. When an impoverished rural school needs a substitute teacher for a month, no one with any education is willing to take the job. The one-room school is a ramshackle affair, with fewer amenities than a modern American henhouse. The students sit on rough plank benches. Finally a substitute is found: 13-year-old Wei Minzhi. Barely older than some of her students and prone to pouting, she seems more like an inept babysitter than a teacher.

When the regular teacher departs for a month to visit family members who are ill, he gives “Teacher Wei” a charge. Too many students have been dropping out. Upon his return he expects to find not one student gone. If Wei can accomplish this, she will receive a bonus.

At first the task seems impossible. The students balk at bestowing the title “Teacher” on an insecure peasant girl. Zhang Huike, a Bart Simpson-like rascal, sets out to make Wei’s life a misery, and succeeds admirably. When he runs away to the big city, a simple mission drives Wei to follow him: Bring Zhang back to school and earn the bonus.

Wei and Zhang embark on a Dickensian journey through the grimy industrial city of Jiangjiakou where the newly rich and the perpetually poor coexist in surreal parallel worlds. Wei wanders the streets, naively seeking information about her missing pupil. She draws up crude posters. Eventually a stranger suggests that she appeal to the city’s television station.

Rebuffed by an insensitive and arrogant secretary at the station, Wei refuses to give up. She posts herself at the gate, asking each person who enters or leaves if he or she is the station manager. She’ll pass out on the street before she gives up. Her determination is rewarded; she meets a cosmopolitan newswoman, who, like her Western counterparts, has considerable clout.

Another formidable young woman is the protagonist of Joan Chen’s 1998 directorial debut, Xiu-Xiu: The Sentdown Girl. Chen, best known to American audiences for her role in the TV series Twin Peaks, was a famous child actor in China before coming to the United States. Xiu-Xiu is a riveting drama based on a novella about a teenager who is sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. With dreams of riding horses and assisting in the triumph of the masses, Xiu-Xiu sets out with high hopes and a joyful heart. But like so many communist plans, this one is ill-conceived. Xiu-Xiu is luckier than many of the victims of the Cultural Revolution, but she finds herself stranded on the steppe. Her master is a kind man, but he is uneducated and unable to help. Another man tricks Xiu-Xiu into trading sex for the promise of passage home, and she is bitterly disappointed. Yet even in defeat, she is a strong and compelling character.

In a phone interview I asked Chen about the preponderance of strong female characters in recent films from China. “In China,” she said,

girls were of no value. Sons were raised to provide for their parents, so they were cherished. But a girl would be married off, so you were really raising her for someone else. She was just another mouth to feed. It’s not like that in the city anymore, but in the country it’s still that way in some places. So girls’ lives are more story-worthy than boys’. They have to work so much harder that they are more interesting characters dramatically.

In an earlier interview with Zhang Yimou, I’d asked about the recurring theme of the oppression of women in his films. “I’m not saying the Chinese people still act like [the characters in Raise the Red Lantern],” he replied. “But they still think that way.” Ang Lee echoed the sentiment when I interviewed him several years ago at the Seattle Film Festival. “The greatest strength of the Chinese people,” Ang said, “is also their greatest weakness. Tradition. Their traditions ground them, but they also hold them back. The trick is to separate what is good and foundational from that which is backward and damaging.”

I shared these comments with Joan Chen and asked if she and other Chinese directors were making a statement on behalf of Chinese girls.

“That’s an interesting observation,” she said after pausing a moment. “But if we are, it’s not intentional. I think we are all drawn to great stories.”

Stefan Ulstein teaches film at Northwest College in Kirkland, Washington.