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Xiao Hong on screen: autobiography, translation, and textual infidelity in her biopics

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Xiao Hong on screen: autobiography, translation, and textual infidelity in her biopics

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Xiao Hong on Screen:
Autobiography, Translation, and Textual Infidelity in Her Biopics

by

Yuxuan Shao

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES

December 2020

Copyright 2020 Yuxuan Shao
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
Xiao Hong’s Literature as Translation ....................................................................................... 5
The Feminist Literary Self-consciousness in Tales of Hulan River ........................................ 12
Translating her Own Life in Autobiographical Writing .......................................................... 20
The Biopics as Method ............................................................................................................ 29
The Biopics in China ............................................................................................................... 31
Translating Xiao Hong in her Biopics ..................................................................................... 34
Huo Jian-qi’s Falling Flowers: A Triple Betrayal ........................................................................... 35
A Patriotic and Masculine Melodrama ............................................................................................. 41
Ann Hui’s The Golden Era: An Homage to Xiao Hong’s Literature ............................................... 44
Ann Hui’s “Accented” Subjectivity ................................................................................................. 52
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 57
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 60

iii
Abstract

Xiao Hong (1911-1942) was a brilliant Chinese author who, to a large extent, overcame
the male-dominated leftist literary tradition in her era by sympathizing with women’s
common fate, giving voice to the struggles of women, and expressing feminist viewpoints.
This paper will rediscover Xiao Hong’s literature and her feminist viewpoints from the
perspective of studying the cinematic representations of her. This paper will examine the
autobiographical writings of Xiao Hong, including Tales of Hulan River (Hulanhe zhuan,
1942) and other short stories and essays, exploring the feminist standpoint in her texts. And,
by considering the two biopics of Xiao Hong, Falling Flowers (Huo Jian-qi, 2012) and The
Golden Era (Ann Hui, 2014), as “reverse translations” of Xiao Hong’s literature, this paper
will consider to what extent they are faithful to Xiao Hong’s literature, to what extent they
betray the original texts, and for what reasons the textual infidelity is conducted both
deliberately and inevitably in resonance with the filmmakers’ different subjectivities.

1
Introduction
Xiao Hong (1911-1942) was a brilliant Chinese author who, to a large extent, overcame
the male-dominated leftist literary tradition in her era by sympathizing with women’s
common fate, giving voice to the struggles of women, and expressing feminist viewpoints.
Even though Xiao Hong was considered as a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers
(Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng), she was underestimated in Chinese literary history for a long time
because her unique writing style differentiated her from other leftist revolutionary
contemporaries. In the 1960s, the scholar C. T. Hsia rediscovered and re-canonized a lot of
previously marginalized Chinese writers, such as Eileen Chang, Shen Cong-wen, Qian
Zhong-shu, in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi, 1961).
1

However, he still ignored Xiao Hong’s literary achievements by categorizing her literature
simply under the leftist works. The translator and scholar Howard Goldblatt rediscovered
Xiao Hong and brought her literature into the English-speaking world by translating most of
her works and writing a biography of her in 1976. In her article “Homeless in the Fatherland:
Xiao Hong’s Migrant Geographies,” Clara Iwasaki assesses the “problematization of
diasporic nostalgia” in Xiao Hong’s works, and explores how Xiao Hong plays a different
role in depicting the “incorporation of female national subjects into the struggle to liberate
Manchuria” as compared to her male counterparts.
2

1
Chih-tsing Hsia. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction /Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi (Shanghai:
fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005).
2
Clara Iwasaki. “Homeless in the Fatherland: Xiao Hong’s Migration Geographies,” Cross-Currents: East
Asian History and Culture Review, Vol.8, No. 2, (2019): 634-660.
2
2011 marked Xiao Hong’s centennial birthday. Two biographical films about her,
Falling Flowers (Huo Jian-qi, 2012) and The Golden Era (Ann Hui, 2014), were released in
succession. Presenting Xiao Hong’s life, love stories, and literature on screen, these two films
have called attention back to Xiao Hong studies both in scholarly discourse and among the
general viewership and readership, inspiring a new perspective in studying Xiao Hong in
Chinese scholarship; namely, the examination of the cinematic representations of Xiao Hong.
Some Chinese scholars have touched upon this area. For instance, Jin-yan Wang compares
the two biographical films and considers their differences in presenting Xiao Hong in terms
of motivation, technique, and theme.
3
Shan-yin Yang addresses the limitations of these two
films in revealing Xiao Hong’s writerly identity and restoring the historical authenticity in
that era.
4
Ying-ying Zhan in her work looks at the significant role the two films play in
spreading Xiao Hong’s literary works within a consumerist society.
5
Despite the popularity
of studying Xiao Hong from the perspective of her images on screen, very few works put
emphasis on the close, yet dangerous, attachment between Xiao Hong’s literary works and
the cinematic representations of them. How can we examine the relationship between Xiao
Hong’s original texts and her image on screen? Towards what contents, her personal history
or her literary legacy, should Xiao Hong’s biopics show faithfulness?

3
Jin-yan Wang. “The Filmic Construction of Xiao Hong: Falling Flowers and The Golden Era as
Examples (Xiao Hong de yingxiang goujian),” Wenjiao Ziliao, 2016, Vol. 9: 9-11.
4
Shan-yin Yang. “Reconstructing Xiao Hong in Films (lun dianying dui Xiao Hong de zaisuzai),”
Mingzuo Xinshang, 2017, vol. 11: 100-102
5
Ying-ying Zhan. “The Spreading of Xiao Hong’s Literature in the Consumerism Era (xiaofei shidai Xiao
Hong jiqi zuopin de chuanbo),” Wenjiao Ziliao, 2017, vol. 8: 9-10.
3
In this paper I argue that the two biopics of Xiao Hong should be considered not only as
revelations of her real life, but also as translations of her literature. Therefore, in order to
study the complicated relations between Xiao Hong’s writings and their cinematic
representations, this paper will, in the first part, examine the autobiographical writings of
Xiao Hong, including Tales of Hulan River (Hulanhe zhuan, 1942) and other short stories and
essays, exploring the feminist standpoint in her works. Building upon Rey Chow’s analysis of
“reverse translations,”
6
I argue that Xiao Hong’s autobiographical writings can be read as
“reverse translations” of not only the native customs but also her own life experiences. On
the one hand, Xiao Hong “reversely” translates the native customs in her hometown,
prioritizing how the customs are translated into a modernized language and viewed by the
modernized readers. In doing so, she reconstructs the cultural landscape of her hometown,
and documents the living conditions of the common people, especially of the women, within
such a cultural space. Instead of faithfully preserving the authenticity and accuracy of the
original customs, the author puts more emphasis on expressing her feminist viewpoints and
reaching out to a wider readership in a modernized or even feminist literacy system. On the
other hand, I consider Xiao Hong’s autobiographical writings as “reverse translations” in that
the autobiographer not only transcribes her own life experiences and memories into another
literary code, but also edits the fragments she would use in order to reveal her self-
understanding and self-consciousness. In her autobiographical writings, Xiao Hong translates

6
Rey Chow. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 61-78.
4
and highlights the feeling of desolation as a displaced woman writer, and links such a feeling
with her critiques of the ruthless patriarchal codes, reiterating her feminist standpoint.
Xiao Hong’s texts feature the emphasis of women’s common fate and the feminist
expression, largely differentiating Xiao Hong’s writing styles from her contemporaries’ and
forming her unique literary and cultural legacy. Considered as translations of literature and
showing faithfulness to the original texts, the biopics of Xiao Hong should necessarily restore
the feminist expression and preserve the literary and cultural legacy of her writings.
Nonetheless, the biopics are based not only on the subject’s personal life and the literary
works in Xiao Hong’s case, but also on the filmmakers’ own interpretations, aesthetic
selections, and cinematic/ literary creativities. Under such circumstance, is it still possible
and necessary for the biopics to be faithful to the original literature and literary legacy? Is it
acceptable for the filmmakers to conduct textual infidelities both deliberately and inevitably
in resonance with their own subjectivities? Can the biopics of writers also be considered as
“reverse translations” in which the original sources are not always prioritized? To answer
these questions, I will take the two biopics of Xiao Hong, Huo Jian-qi’s Falling Flowers and
Ann Hui’s The Golden Era, as case studies, examine their representations of Xiao Hong and
their attachments to the original literature, and consider the filmmakers’ different
subjectivities, respectively.
Based on Xiao Hong’s autobiographical writings, these two biopics, adopt identical
plots and both preserve the historical truths of Xiao Hong’s life; however, they represent
Xiao Hong in two aesthetically and ideologically different ways. Depicting Xiao Hong as an
ailing and fragile woman and centralizing her romantic stories, Huo Jian-qi documents Xiao
5
Hong from a masculine perspective and explores an entertaining way of filming a patriotic
biopic. Despite his goal of telling a real life story, Huo reconstructs and even fictionalizes the
image of Xiao Hong, based on his own understanding of May Fourth texts and in line with
the May Fourth male authors’ representation of women. Ann Hui, on the other hand, puts
more emphasis on depicting the feelings of displacement and desolation in Xiao Hong’s
writings, echoing with Hui’s own “accented subjectivity” as a Hong Kong woman filmmaker;
and, Hui’s feminist expression in this film can be read as an homage to Xiao Hong’s literary
and cultural legacy. Even though The Golden Era shows faithfulness to Xiao Hong’s
literature and feminist viewpoints, it also inevitably submits to the filmmaker’s self-
expression. In this sense, Xiao Hong’s biopic as translation is always a negotiated one: the
literary origin, only as one of the intertextual elements of the biopic, is always in negotiation
with the directorial aesthetic.

Xiao Hong’s Literature as Translation
In “Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (2015),” Rey Chow presents another
signification of translation, likening it to a “reflexive rendering of an indigenous tradition by
way of depressive scenarios (and depressive characters)” to “an act of translation.”
7
To
illustrate this point, Chow analyzes one scene from renowned modern Chinese author Ba
Jin’s novel Family (Jia, 1933). In this short scene, Ba Jin details a traditional Chinese family
ritual in which some women wail loudly to mourn the dead, and in the meantime, ridicules

7
Rey Chow. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 64.
6
the hypocrisy of such a gesture since these women are all hired to do this chore and are only
performing perfunctorily. Chow argues that this “fragmenting or partitioning of the
indigenous culture in the form of a residual object”
8
actually derives from the author’s
narrative consciousness, which means that the author is reporting or criticizing the indigenous
culture with an intellectual’s modernized viewpoint. Such a narrative consciousness therefore
distinguishes the narrator or the author himself from the backward setting of the story, and
transcribes such a ridiculously anachronistic ritual into another modernized language (or
system of literacy). Chow also states that such a translation could be conceived as a “reverse
translation.” Unlike the traditional translating practice in which the original texts are always
prioritized, in such a reverse translation the power dynamic between the original language/
literacy and the target one is totally altered. In Ba Jin’s case, the accuracy or authenticity of
the original custom is inferior to how this custom is translated into a modernized language
and how it is viewed by its modernized readers.
9
In this sense, the author is not only
translating, but also betraying his own native culture.
10

Building upon Chow’s analytical perspective, I argue that a much of Xiao Hong’s texts
should be considered as “reverse translations” with an anthropological gaze, especially her
autobiographical works. Tales of Hulan River, an autobiographical novel written in Xiao
Hong’s last few years, is a perfect example to substantiate such a creative writing mode. In
this novel Xiao Hong uses the first two chapters to, first of all, portray the “inconsequential

8
Ibid, 63.
9
Rey Chow. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 67.
10
Ibid, 67.
7
and common realities of daily life”
11
of people in her hometown, Hulan county in
Heilongjiang province in Manchuria. Then she documents the old customs, including “the
dance of sorceress; the harvest dances; releasing river lanterns; outdoor performances; and
the festival at the Temple of the Immortal Matron on the eighteenth day of the fourth lunar
month,”
12
which she witnesses with an outsider’s anthropological gaze. This section
examines the means by which Xiao Hong “reversely” translates the old customs in Hulan
County, and to what extent and for what reasons she betrays the original texts. I argue that
through such “reverse translations,” Xiao Hong neutrally reconstructs the cultural landscape
of her hometown without directly criticizing the backwardness of the customs, and aims to
document the living conditions of the common people, especially of the women, within such
a cultural space instead of showing faithfulness to the customs themselves.
In translating the old customs in Hulan county, Xiao Hong first writes about the
sorceress (tiao dashen):
先说⼤神。⼤神是会治病的，她穿着奇怪的⾐裳，那以上平常的⼈不穿，红的，是
⼀张裙⼦，那裙⼦⼀围在她的腰上，她的⼈就变样了。开初，她并不打⿎，只是⼀
围起那红花裙⼦就哆嗦。从头到脚，⽆处不哆嗦，哆嗦了⼀阵之后，又开始打颤。
她闭着眼睛，嘴⾥噗噗的。每⼀打颤，就要装出来要倒的样⼦。把四边的⼈都吓得
⼀跳，可是她又坐住了。
We’ll begin with the sorceress. The sorceress can cure diseases, and she dresses
herself in peculiar clothing of a type that ordinary people do not wear. She is all in
red—a red skirt—and the moment she puts this skirt around her waist she
undergoes a transformation. Rather than starting by beating her drum, she wraps her
embroidered red skirt around herself and begins to tremble. Every part of her body,

11
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 129.
12
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 129.
8
from her head to her toes, trembles at once, then begins to quake violently. With her
eyes closed, she mumbles constantly. Whenever her body begins to quake, she
looks as if she is about to collapse, throwing a scare into people’s watching; but
somehow she always manages to sit down properly.
13

Xiao Hong starts the narration of the sorceress activity (tiao dashen) by detailing the
costume, the “red skirt” the sorceress woman is wearing. In doing so, Xiao Hong emphasizes
that the narrator is only attracted by the sorceress woman’s “peculiar clothing of a type
ordinary people do not wear” and her strange practices, instead of really caring about the
superstitious assumption that the sorceress could cure diseases. Xiao Hong, intentionally or
not, positions the narrator only as an observer with an anthropological gaze, instead of a
participant who also engages in this backward practice. By directly saying that the sorceress
woman “pretends to collapse”
14
in order to “throw a scare into people’s watching,” Xiao
Hong points out that the sorceress is only performing in a bizarre way to entertain the
audience. Consequently, the entire practice can be perceived as a mere exotic “spectacle”
from the narrator’s perspective. In this sense, what the narrator is doing is transcribing the
visual code into a literary one, and introducing the ridiculously backward, yet exotically
interesting, spectacle into the modernized literacy system.
The way Xiao Hong translates the traditional customs in Hulan County with an
anthropological gaze is very much similar to Ba Jin’s case in which he presents the
“ritualized mourning” as an anachronistic farce
15
. However, different from Ba Jin’s

13
Ibid, 130.
14
In Howard Goldblatt’s translation, he translates the original texts “就要装出来要倒的样⼦” into
“looks as if she is about to collapse.” However, from my perspective, in her original texts, Xiao Hong
emphasizes the verb “zhuang” (pretend), and in doing so positions the narrator only as an observer.
Therefore, here I would use my own translation to illustrate my viewpoints.
15
Rey Chow. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 63.
9
embodiment of resistance and reform through ridiculing and criticizing the traditional
familial routine, I argue that Xiao Hong’s translation functions not to serve the May Fourth
anti-tradition frame, but rather to neutrally provide a cultural backdrop without directly
criticizing the backwardness of the customs themselves, reconstruct the cultural landscape of
her hometown, and present the common people’s living conditions within such a cultural
space. In other words, compared to Ba Jin’s presentation of the native traditions as a
backward spectacle which should be critiqued and abandoned, Xiao Hong, in her reverse
translation of the native customs, focuses more on documenting the people who are living
with such customs in her hometown.
Besides portraying the “sorceress” activity as a spectacle, Xiao Hong adds an additional
layer by depicting the Hulan people’s viewing such an activity as a spectacle as well:
跳⼤神，⼤半是天⿊跳起，只要⼀打起⿎来，就男⼥⽼幼，都往这跳神的⼈家跑，
若是夏天，就屋⾥屋外都挤满了⼈。还有些⼥⼈，抱着孩⼦，哭天叫地地从墙头上
调过来，跳过来看跳神的。
……
过了⼗天半⽉的，又是跳神的⿎，当当地响。于是⼈们又都着了慌。爬墙的爬墙，
登门的登门，看看这⼀家的⼤神，显的是什么本领，穿的是什么⾐裳。听听她唱的
是什么腔调，看看她的⾐裳漂不漂亮。
The dance of the sorceress normally commences at dusk. At the sound of her drum,
men, women, and children dash over to the house where she is engaged; on
summer evenings, crowds of people fill the rooms and the yard outside. Excited,
shouting women drag or carry their children, along as they clamber over walls to
watch the dance of the sorceress, which continues late into the night, until at last
the spirit is sent back up the mountain.
……
Ten days or two weeks later, the thudding drumbeat of the sorceress’ dance is heard
again, and once more the people are aroused. They climb over walls and pour
10
through the gate to take a look at the sorceress who has been summoned: What are
her special talents? What is she wearing? Listen to hear what chants she sings; look
to see how beautiful her clothing is.
16

Most of these Hulan people, very much like the narrator herself, are only curious about what
type of costume the sorceress woman is wearing, whether the sorceress woman has some
“benling”
17
to show, and if the chants she sings are beautiful or not. According to the
Chinese superstitious belief, the sorceress activity is supposed to be a healing practice to cure
people’s ailments; however, in Xiao Hong’s depiction, it is more like an exemplification of
people’s lack of entertainment in their banal everyday lives. In this sense, Xiao Hong aims to
document the common people’s living conditions in Hulan County with all the traditional
customs she translates in the first place only as a cultural backdrop. Through observing and
documenting people’s participation in these old traditions, Xiao Hong explores the social
interactions in this patriarchal society. Among them, Xiao Hong puts the most emphasis on
caring about women’s fate.
While introducing another tradition, the open-air theater performances, Xiao Hong tells
a series of interesting trivial stories happening around the watchers. For instance, by virtue of
participating in such an event, a married daughter is able to go back to visit her maternal
family and sincerely reunite with her sisters; some neighbors get together gossiping about
other ones or quarreling with each other; a bunch of country folks take carts to town from
faraway only to watch the theatre performances, etc. Utilizing a fragmented narrative, Xiao

16
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 131-132.
17
In Goldblatt’s version, he translates “benling” into “special talents”. And from my perspective, it
could also be understood as “good performance.”
11
Hong reveals a vivid montage of Hulan people’s everyday life with the open-air theater as the
cultural backdrop. Among these scenes, Xiao Hong puts the most emphasis on depicting a
kind of arranged marriage, namely, the “womb marriage” (which means the marriage is
arranged when the young people are still unborn). Xiao Hong describes the drawbacks of
such a “womb marriage” to illustrate the fate of the women in it. Once involuntarily engaged
in such a relationship, they are unable to escape from it; and in the meantime, they are
inclined to gain bad reputations within their patriarchal households. After depicting the story
of a girl in such a marriage from a third-person viewpoint, the narrator changes to an
omniscient narrative tone, standing outside the scene, and directly expresses her own
critiques of such an unreasonable marriage structure:
年轻的⼥⼦，莫名其妙的，不知道⾃⼰为什么要有这样的命，于是往往演出悲剧
来，跳井的跳井，上吊的上吊。
古语说，“⼥⼦上不了战场。”
其实不对的，这井多么深，平⽩地你问⼀个男⼦，问他这井敢跳不敢跳，怕他也不
敢的。⽽⼀个年轻的⼥⼦竟敢了，上战场不⼀定死，也许回来闹个⼀官半职的。可
是跳井就很难不死，⼀跳就多半淹死了。
The young women, bewildered, cannot understand why they must suffer such a fate,
and so tragedy is often the result; some jump down wells, others hang themselves.
An old saying goes: “A battlefield is no place for a woman.”
Actually, that’s not a fair statement; those wells are terribly deep, and if you were to
casually ask a man whether or not he would dare to jump down one, I’m afraid the
answer would be ‘no’. A young woman, on the other hand, would certainly do so.
Now while an appearance on a battlefield doesn’t necessarily lead to death, an in
fact might even result in an official position, there’s not much chance of someone
emerging alive after jumping down a well—most never do.
18

18
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 142.
12
In doing so, Xiao Hong reveals her narrative consciousness, and, more importantly, foretells
and emphasizes her feminist concerns as the most significant theme throughout the novel.
That is to say, by reversely translating the old customs in her hometown, Xiao Hong does not
aim to directly criticize the customs themselves, but to document the common fate of the
people, especially the women, living with these customs, and to report the repression of
women by the traditional patriarchal system.

The Feminist Literary Self-consciousness in Tales of Hulan River
In the previous analysis, I argue that differing from the anti-traditional narrative of the
May Fourth writings in which the writers unfaithfully translate the traditional customs in
order to advocate for revolution and resistance, Xiao Hong’s reverse translation of the native
culture could be considered as an alternative one in that her translation serves her emphasis of
people’s living conditions, and to be more specific, of women’s fate and repression caused by
the patriarchal codes. In the next part I will examine by what means Xiao Hong addresses the
“women problem” in her writings, and how her literary feminist self-consciousness
distinguishes her writings from those by May Fourth male writers.
While a wide range of May Fourth literature works emphasized the issue of women’s
emancipation, most of them fell into a “male discourse” because, on the one hand, they were
mostly presented and crafted by male writers “on behalf of women”
19
and sometimes
women’s plight was even appropriated by these male writers to express “their own feelings of

19
Hua R. Lan, Vanessa L. Fong (ed.), Women in Republic China: A Source Book (New York: M. E.
Sharpe, Inc., 1999), xiv.
13
powerlessness in the face of an all-embracing family system.”
20
Borrowing Ching-kiu
Stephan Chan’s conclusion, in the male-centered May Fourth literary context, women were
represented by male writers as an “alienated, repressed, but emerging other.”
21
In other
words, the representation of women turns into an “objectifying process”
22
of the male
intellectuals’ own identity crisis in that time period. On the other hand, the issue of women’s
emancipation was closely connected with and even subordinate to the agenda of national
modernization. Women were considered as the victim of the traditional patriarchal system
(symbolized by foot binding, arranged marriage, female chastity, etc.). In order to break with
the backward tradition and realize national modernization, women should be liberated
(probably by their male counterparts) in the first place. Even though these intellectuals paid
attention to women’s problems and encouraged women’s liberation, they still inevitably
subjugated women’s issues within a subjective judging male gaze. For instance, Chen Du-xiu
calls for women to regain “a sense of personhood” only because the “enshrined principles of
proper social constructs for women were incompatible with a modern way of life.”
23
In his
case, women’s lifestyles, after being strictly scrutinized by male intellectuals and prescribed
as “incompatible with a modern way,” consequently needed to be revolutionized.

20
Ibid.
21
Tani E. Barlow, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1993), 13.
22
Tani E. Barlow, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1993), 17.
23
Hua R. Lan, Vanessa L. Fong (ed.), Women in Republic China: A Source Book (New York: M. E.
Sharpe, Inc., 1999), xiii.
14
Within the May Fourth context, Lu Xun is one of the most important and unique writers
who cares about women’s fate. He not only published an essay named “What Happens after
Nora Walks Out” in 1923 which inspired a wide discussion on the theme of “Chinese Noras,”
but also developed some of Chinese literary history’s most influential female characters, such
as Xiang-lin’s Wife in “New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Si-ming’s wife in “Soap” (1924),
in Chinese literature history. In his writings, Lu Xun attempts to challenge the May Fourth
male-centered discourse by encouraging women to gaze at men and confessing the impotence
of the male intellectual figures. Nonetheless, despite Lu Xun’s foregrounding of female
protagonists, women in his texts remain observed subjects, rather than active observers.
I will take the woman figure Xiang-lin’s wife in “New Year’s Sacrifice” as an example
to illustrate this point. Xiang-lin’s wife is a traditional lower-class woman and diligent
worker who suffers from a series of traumas including her mother-in-law’s exploitation,
being forced into a remarriage, losing her only son, and being discriminated against by other
neighbors. In the end, she decides to end her life. This story can be divided into two parts, in
the first of which Lu Xun writes that the narrator, a male intellectual, meets with Xiang-lin’s
wife in person. And in the second part, the narrator jumps out and tells the life story of
Xiang-lin’s wife. In this part (which is also the majority of the story), Lu Xun utilizes a
traditional narrative vehicle to depict a someone else’s (a woman’s) story like a hearsay or a
spectacle from an observing intellectual’s perspective. Nonetheless, in the opening part of
this story, Lu Xun breaks the fourth wall between the spectator (the narrator) and the
observed subject (Xiang-lin’s wife), and directly builds up some interactions between the
15
woman protagonist and the narrator, between the lower-class woman and the male
intellectual. Lu Xun depicts the narrator’s encounter with Xianglin’s wife like this:
⾛出来，就在河边遇见她；⽽且见她瞪着的眼睛的视线，就知道明明是向我⾛来的。
As I came out met her by the river, and seeing the way she fastened her eyes on me
I knew very well she meant to speak to me.
24

Instead of positioning the man as the observer, Lu Xun reverses the power dynamic, and
writes that it is the woman who “fastened her eyes” on the man because she had something to
say to him. Even though Xiang-lin’s wife appears as a pathetic beggar-like character in this
society, Lu Xun still gives her the power to gaze at a male intellectual and to ask a tough
question: “After a person dies, does he turn into a ghost or not?” And in the following part,
Lu Xun writes:
我很悚然，⼀见她的眼盯着我的，背上也就遭了芒刺⼀般，⽐在学校⾥遇到不及豫
防的临时考，教师又偏是站在⾝旁的时候，惶急得多了。
As she fixed her eyes on me I was seized with foreboding. A shiver ran down my
spine and I felt more nervous than during an unexpected examination at school,
when unfortunately, the teacher stands by one’s side.
25

The female character not only gazes at the narrator, but also frightens him with her question,
as if she herself is an “unexpected examination.” In doing so, Lu Xun makes the gaze from
the woman so powerful that the male intellectual only submits to it with a merely vague
answer “I am not sure.”
26
Throughout the story Lu Xun does not directly points out what
makes the woman’s gaze unbearably powerful to the intellectual; however, I argue that the
power actually dwells in the male writer’s self-confession about his impotence since he has

24
Lu Xun, “New Year’s Sacrifice”, The Power of Weakness (New York: The Feminist Press, 2007), 29.
25
Lu Xun, “New Year’s Sacrifice”, The Power of Weakness (New York: The Feminist Press, 2007), 30.
26
Ibid, 31.
16
no idea how he could “save” such a woman. In this sense, Lu Xun still positions the narrator
(the male intellectual figure) as an active observer or a potential life savior, and thus fails to
give the women protagonist the voice that really belongs to herself. Xiao Hong’s literature
takes one step forward by creating some powerful female narrators and sympathizing with
women’s common fate.
Tales of Hulan River can be divided into two parts. In the first one, Xiao Hong, using an
adult outsider’s perspective, translates the people’s living conditions under the old customs in
Hulan, and thus offers the readers a more general impression of this small county. In
documenting the spectacles (both of the customs and people’s lives) in Hulan, the narrator
seldom interacts with the villagers, but from time to time steps outside and comments on
these spectacles as if she is directly talking to her readers. For instance, after she introduces
the fate of the women involved in the “womb marriages,” the narrator directly expresses her
own critique of the unreasonable marriage structure. Taking one step forward, the narrator
extends her critique to the whole patriarchal society in which the right to speak and record is
fully controlled by the male authoritative figures. She writes:
那么节妇坊上为什么没写着赞美⼥⼦跳井跳得勇敢的赞词？那是修节妇坊的⼈故意
给删去的。因为修节妇坊的，多半是男⼈。他家⾥也有⼀个⼥⼈。他怕是写上了，
将来他打⼥⼈的时候，他的⼥⼈也去跳井。⼥⼈也跳了井，留下来⼀⼤群孩⼦可怎
么办？于是⼀律不写，只写，温⽂尔雅，孝顺公婆……
Then why is it that no words of praise for the courage of these women who jump
down wells are included in the memorial arches for chaste women? That is because
they have all been intentionally omitted by the compilers of such memorials, nearly
all of whom are men, each with a wife at home. They are afraid that if they write
such things, one day, when they beat their own wife, she too may jump down a well;
if she did she would leave behind a brood of children, and what would these men do
17
then? So with unanimity they avoid writing such things, and concern themselves
only with “the refined, the cultured, and the filial……”
27

At this moment in the text, Xiao Hong is not merely attacking the cruelty of the patriarchal
morality in Hulan, but also challenging the whole male-centered literary history. Since it is
the men who compile the memorial arches for women, they would only record and praise
those women’s “virtues,” such as being “cultured” “refined” and “filial,” that could
eventually benefit themselves. Considering those men’s compiling memorial arches as a
miniature of the entire Chinese literary history, Xiao Hong is actually challenging the whole
male-centered intellectual tradition and is resisting the fact that woman’s fate can only be
observed and judged by their male counterparts.
Similarly, in depicting another custom, the festival at the Temple of the Immortal
Matron on the eighteenth day of the fourth lunar month, the narrator also departs from the
original texts (people’s celebration in this case), and instead, expresses her critique of the
patriarchal codes in order to directly draw the audience’s attention. Noticing the fact that
people are inclined to show more piety and respect to the male clay idols rather than the
female ones, the narrator tries to uncover the reasons behind such a circumstance. She
explains that, “the people who cast the clay idols were men, and they fashioned the female
figures with an obedient appearance”; however, they fashioned the male ones “with a savage,
malignant appearance.”
28
In doing so, they want the male idols to “strike fear” into the
prayers and gain “absolute conviction” from them. By contrast, they fashioned the female

27
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 142.
28
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 149.
18
figures with an obedient appearance in order to tell everyone that women are “easily taken
advantage of.”
29
In the meantime, such a situation could also be extended to ridicule the
whole male-centered literary tradition in which the male intellectuals judge whether a woman
is “moral” or not, “progressive” or “backward”, and depict the women images to serve their
own imaginations.
In her “reverse” translation of the native culture in Hulan County, Xiao Hong deviates
from the original “texts” (the life of the woman who suffered from the “womb marriage” in
the first case and people’s celebrating the festival in the second) and focuses more on the
target language or literacy system. In other words, the author’s emphasis here is not to
faithfully preserve the authenticity or accuracy of the original texts, but to express her
feminist viewpoints and reach out to a wider readership or spectatorship in a modernized or
even feminist literacy system.

In the other part of Tales of Hulan River, adopting a little girl’s tone, Xiao Hong
portrays the childhood time she spent in her grandfather’s place and simultaneously records a
few specific characters with whom she has interactions as a child. In the fifth chapter, the
little girl narrator tells the tragedy of a child bride in the Hu household, which could be
considered one of the most disturbing scenes in the whole novel. This story can be briefly
summarized like this: a healthy, pretty, twelve-year-old child bride married to the Hu family
is believed to have a disease because she is not shy in front of other people. After being
inhumanely beaten and abused by her mother-in-law for a long time, she gets seriously ill.

29
Ibid, 150.
19
The Hu family, conferring with other neighbors, decides to bring in some sorceress methods
to “cure” the child bride, which factually leads to her death.
This image of the child bride shares a lot of similarities with the image of Xiang-lin’s
wife created by Lu Xun in that they are both tortured and even treated like animals by their
husbands’ families. However, in contrast with Lu Xun’s literary practice in “New Year’s
Sacrifice” in which he tells (the majority of) the story from a third-person viewpoint like
hearsay and presents the male narrator’s impotence facing such a woman figure, Xiao Hong
in this story builds up direct interactions or even friendship between the child bride and the
girl narrator, and allows the narrator to speak out for the subject.
Throughout this upsetting story, nearly everyone in the community believes that the
child bride has a disease only because she does not act like a child bride (for example, she is
not “shy around people”, and eats three bowls of rice on the first day at her mother-in-law’s).
In order to “cure” her “disease”, the Hu family as well as other neighbors all agree to apply
some superstitious methods to her (for instance, they use extremely hot water to bathe her
which directly results in her death). Nonetheless, only the narrator claims that the child bride
is not sick at all and proves it by giving her a marble and a little platter to play. In doing so,
the narrator points out that the child bride is supposed to be a carefree little girl playing toys
and spending time with her friends. What is really revolting is the patriarchal order that
ruthlessly demands a little girl to be obedient to the wifely moralities.
By using the double-narrator structure in Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong presents two
co-existing temporalities: from the adult outsider’s viewpoint, Xiao Hong expresses her
critique of the patriarchal society and directly reaches out to the readership or the
20
spectatorship; and adopting the little girl’s tone, she creates another narrator who has some
direct interactions with the characters, especially with the women characters, and speaks out
for them. In this sense, through switching between the two narrators and the two
temporalities, Xiao Hong creates a plurality of women’s voices which not only unites the
women characters, the narrator(s), and the potential readers/ spectators as a feminist
collective, but also encourages women to speak out for women just like the little girl narrator
speaks out for the miserable child bride. Like the narrator in Lu Xun’s “New Year’s
Sacrifice” who could not save Xiang-lin’s wife, the girl narrator in Tales of Hulan River is
also weak in terms of changing the whole society. Nonetheless, the usage of the little girl
narrator also indicates other expectation of Xiao Hong’s: even though the feminist voice is
still fragile at this moment, it can eventually grow strong someday.

Translating her Own Life in Autobiographical Writing
In my previous analysis, I argued that in Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong reveals the
traditional customs and people’s living conditions in her hometown of Hulan County in order
to express her feminist viewpoints. Her writings here can be considered as a process of
reverse translation, in which she betrays the authenticity and accuracy of the original texts
and focuses more on her feminist expressions. On the other hand, Xiao Hong’s Tales of
Hulan River can be conceived as a “reverse” translation because Xiao Hong not only deals
with her own life experiences and memories as the original sources, but also prioritizes the
revelation of her self-understanding over the accuracy of the original.
21
In his work “Rethinking the Fictive, Reclaiming the Real: Autobiography, Narrative
Time, and the Burden of Truth (2003),” Mark Freeman questions the truthfulness of
autobiographies. The reason is twofold: On the one hand, Freeman states that the “reality and
truth are predicted in terms of linear time, or clock time”; however, “the entire
autobiographical enterprise” is only “hopelessly inventive ” because “there is no possibility
of every returning to those ticking moments and telling it like it really was.”
30
On the other
hand, autobiographical narratives are inclined to build up some causality between
independent incidents in one’s life, endowing what happened in the past with some artificial
connotations to consequently become the “consolations for the aimlessness”
31
of our lives.
That is to say, autobiographical writings actually blur the boundary between truth and
falsification, or between the reality and one’s own delusion. Nonetheless, autobiographical
writings are not only reflecting the reality or what factually happened in the past, but more
importantly, reflecting the autobiographer’s self-understanding and self-consciousness. In
this sense, autobiographical writings can be considered as another type of “reverse”
translation: the autobiographer not only transcribes his/her own life experiences and
memories into another literary code, but also selects and edits the fragments he/she would use
in order to reveal his/her self-understanding and self-consciousness. In such a process, the
translator prioritizes the target language over showing faithfulness to the original texts or the
reality.

30
Mark Freeman. “Rethinking the Fictive, Reclaiming the Real: Autobiography, Narrative Time, and
the Burden of the truth”. Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain (Cary:
Oxford University Press,2003), 10.
31
Ibid, 3.
22
In the context of May Fourth texts, autobiography provides “a newly developed vehicle
of representation” for Chinese writers, especially women writers, to present their self-
understanding and claim their self-consciousness. In her work When “I” was Born: Women’s
Autobiography in Modern China (2008), Jing M. Wang argues that “autobiography turned
out to be a highly public form that revealed significant changes in women’s self-perception,
self-reinvention, self-narration, and their complex relations with the traditional home and the
country on the brink of extinction.”
32
In other words, through selectively writing about their
own life experiences and memories, autobiographical narrative enables the writers, especially
the women writers, to rediscover their literary self-consciousness and to express their
ideological and philosophical viewpoints using their own voices in the public sphere. Wang
also claims that:
As Chinese women’s roles became increasingly intertwined with and defined by
social and patriotic participation, they turned away from their personal matters to
public issues in their autobiographies. They self-consciously redefined the personal,
merging it with issues of literary, social, and ideological gravity. Thus, contrary to
dwelling on private lives in fiction during the May Fourth period, women writers
fully represented their public self and dealt minimally with their private lives in
most case in autobiography since the late 1920s.
33

Through their autobiographical writings, Chinese women writers no longer exist only as
chaste wives or Confucian mothers, but rather claim their social statuses as intellectuals,
professionals, and even revolutionaries. Therefore, they liberate themselves from the male-

32
Jing M. Wang. When “I” was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 39.
33
Jing M. Wang. When “I” was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 39.
23
dominated literary tradition of the ancient biographies in which male intellectuals praise the
feminine virtues such as filiality and obedience that could eventually benefit themselves.
Xiao Hong’s Tales of Hulan River can be divided into two parts, each of which utilizes a
different narratorial tones. Using an adult outsider’s tone, Xiao Hong reversely translates the
cultural conventions and people’s living conditions in Hulan County and expresses her
feminist thoughts. In this part, Xiao Hong portrays a female intellectual image, or a public
self, in order to express her feminist thinking, which could perfectly fit in with the May
Fourth autobiographical narrative mode. However, instead of directly dealing with her real
life stories, Xiao Hong only positions herself as an outsider or an observer recording what she
sees, which on the other hand challenges the autobiographical writing mode. Nonetheless, it
is the other part, where she adopts a little girl narrator’s tone to depict her childhood life in
her grandfather’s house, that could really be accounted her autobiography, or her translation
of her own life. In the following part, I will examine what contents or themes Xiao Hong is
focusing on in translating her own life. I argue that besides portraying herself as an
intellectual with an ethnographical gaze, Xiao Hong also attempts to depict her private self as
a displaced woman writer losing her permanent home. And I will examine how the depiction
of her private self could be eventually related back to her public self, in other words, how the
theme of being displaced and homeless could be linked back to her feminist thinking.
In the opening line of the third chapter in which Xiao Hong for the first time in Tales of
Hulan River directly tackles her private life, Xiao Hong writes that,
呼兰河这⼩城⾥边住着我的祖⽗。
我⽣的时候，祖⽗已经六⼗多岁了，我长到四五岁，祖⽗就快七⼗了。
24
The town of Hulan River is where my granddad lived. When I was born, Granddad
was already past sixty, and by the time I was four or five, he was approaching
seventy.
34

And in the following part, Xiao Hong uses a large amount of spaces to depict the backyard
garden in her grandfather’s place, and more importantly, the carefree moments when she
planted vegetables, played games, learnt poems with her grandfather. From Xiao Hong’s
perspective, the only one that makes her feel home is her grandfather.
…在这世界上，有了祖⽗就够了，还怕什么呢？虽然⽗亲的冷淡，母亲的恶⾔恶
⾊，和祖母的⽤针刺我⼿指的这些事，都觉得算不了什么。
As for me, I felt that all I needed in this world was Granddad, and with him by my
side I had nothing to fear. Even the cold attitude of my father, my mother’s mean
words and nasty looks, and the incident in which my grandmother pricked my
finger with a needle faded into insignificance.
35

Xiao Hong seldom feels loved in her own family. After her grandfather dies, she spiritually
becomes an orphan. If we reconsider the opening line of the third chapter, we could tell that
Xiao Hong not only foretells that she is going to write about the stories between her
grandfather and herself, but also sets up a foundational tone penetrating the entire narrative in
Tales of Hulan River as well as nearly all her writings: even though she was so young then,
she already confronted the transiency of happiness and home.
Such a “mourning the lost home” theme could be found in many of Xiao Hong’s works.
For instance, in her autobiographical essay “A Sleepless Night” written in 1937, Xiao Hong
systematically analyzes her own feelings of being homeless and displaced. This essay and

34
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 153.
35
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 165.
25
Tales of Hulan River could be conceived as a dialogic process in which they explain and
complement each other. In order to understand Xiao Hong’s emphasis on the sense of being
displaced and homeless, I will bring in this essay and consider the multiple connotations of
“losing her own home” in Xiao Hong’s interior world.
In “A Sleepless Night”, Xiao Hong, first of all, reiterates the loss of her private home in
resonance with Tales of Hulan River. In the first place, she differentiates her own image of
home from her male counterparts. For instance, for some of her friends, “if they could really
go back to Manchuria right now, the first thing they’d do is boil up a pot of sorghum
porridge.”
36
And for her partner San Lang, going back home equates with visiting his
relatives:
我想将来我回家的时候，先买两匹驴，⼀匹你骑着，⼀匹我骑着……先到我姑姑
家，再到我姐姐家……顺便也许看看我的舅舅去……
I think when I finally do go home, I’ll buy two donkeys, one for you to ride and
one for me… first we’ll go to my aunt’s home, and then to my sister’s… on the
way, maybe we’ll visit my uncle…
37

Nonetheless, these two kinds of imaginations never belong to Xiao Hong. She writes that,
但我想我们那门前的蒿草，我想我们那后园⾥开着的茄⼦的紫⾊的⼩花，黄⽠爬上
了架。⽽那清早，朝阳带着露珠⼀齐来了！
What I think about instead is the tall grass outside our door and the little purple
flowers blossoming on the eggplants; I think of the cucumber vines creeping up the
trellis in our backyard and the dewdrops that form at dawn with the rising sun.
38

In this image, it is obvious that Xiao Hong is actually depicting her grandfather’s backyard
garden where she spent a lot of time in her childhood and had a lot of sweet memories with

36
Amy D. Dooling. Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 363.
37
Ibid, 365.
38
Ibid, 354.
26
her grandfather. In doing so, she sadly denies the possibility of her really going back ‘home”
since her grandfather has already passed away and Xiao Hong herself could never be that
childish little girl again.
Secondly, Xiao Hong depicts the traumatic experience of losing the collective
homeland, Manchuria. After Japan established a puppet state in Manchuria, Xiao Hong and
her partner San Lang were unwilling to live as colonized subjects, and thus fled South to
Qingdao, and then to Shanghai in 1934. In spite of embracing totally different imaginations
about “home”, Xiao Hong and other “Northeast” writers do miss one home, conceptually and
collectively—the homeland Manchuria which they are forced to leave and to which they are
unable to return. Such a collective feeling of being homeless is perfectly substantiated by the
scene in which Xiao Hong and San Lang are carefully reading the map of “Natural Resources
of the Northeast” together. In spite of their previous conflicts and mutual misunderstandings,
at this moment they seem so connected with each other by virtue of their collective home,
Manchuria.
Furthermore, Xiao Hong also points out the specificity in imagining home in this essay.
Xiao Hong is an iconoclastic woman who escapes from an arranged marriage, leaves her own
patriarchal family, gets pregnant without getting married, and chooses to devote herself to
literature. Being like this, she is aware that she would unlikely be accepted by a traditional
family again. In this essay, she questions that
你们家对于外来的所谓“媳妇”也⼀样吗？……⽽我呢？坐在驴⼦上，所去的仍是⽣
疏的地⽅，我停着的仍然是别⼈的家乡。
How would your family treat a ‘daughter-in-law’ brought home from somewhere
else?...... No matter where we ride our donkeys, every place will always be
27
unfamiliar to me, and whenever we end up stopping, the homes will always belong
to strangers.
39

On the surface, she is asking her partner San Lang or herself such a tough question. However,
I assume that Xiao Hong is also questioning Chinese women’s common fate within a male-
dominated society. Once a woman decides to leave her patriarchal family, how could she go
back again? In other words, once a woman decides to go against the traditional social order,
will there be somewhere like a warm home that could genuinely accept her real self? In this
sense, Xiao Hong’s analysis in this essay could also be seen as a complement to the feminist
observations in Tales of Hulan River. Her own feelings of being displaced and homeless
could be linked to Chinese women’s common fate living under the patriarchal order.
Looking back at Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong extends such a sense of hopelessness
to the entire work. For instance, in the fourth chapter in Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong
repetitively iterates that “我家是荒凉的/我家的院⼦是荒凉的”/“my home was a dreary one/
our compound was a dreary one”
40
multiple times. In Howard Goldblatt’s translation,
“huangliang” is translated into “dreary”. However, I suppose that “desolate” might be a better
choice in that the sense of “huangliang” includes not only Xiao Hong’s own loneliness and
boredom in her childhood, but also the sense of being hopeless confronting the fact that a
woman is fated to lose her home. If we look back at the first two chapters after reading the
entire work, we could find out that such a sense of desolation is actually running through all
her autobiographical narratives. In depicting the sorceress activity, Xiao Hong writes that,

39
Amy D. Dooling. Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 366.
40
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 180, 187, 191.
28
那⿎声就好像故意招惹那般不幸的⼈，打得有急有慢，好像⼀个迷路的⼈在夜⾥诉
说着他的迷惘，又好像不幸的⽼⼈在回想着他幸福的短短的幼年。又好像慈爱的母
亲送着她的⼉⼦远⾏。又好像是⽣离死别，万分地难舍。
⼈⽣为了什么，才有这样凄凉的夜。
Alternating between a rapid and a languid cadence, it calls forth the image of a lost
traveler giving voice to his confusion, or of an unfortunate old man recalling the
happier days of his all-too-short childhood. It is also reminiscent of a loving mother
sending her son off on a long journey, or of someone at the point of death who isn’t
willing to part with this world.
What is human existence all about? Why must there be nights of such desolation?
41

The depiction here reminds the readers of the miserable child bride dying in the sorceress
activity. And in the meantime, Xiao Hong points out that the adult narrator is not standing
outside observing people’s fate any longer. Instead, her own fate is closely connected with
other women’s common fate. “Why must there be nights of such desolation?” This question
is not only asked to herself, but also to all the audience.

In my previous analysis, I considered Xiao Hong’s autobiographical writings as a
reverse translation in which she, on the one hand, reports the common people’s living
conditions and the fatality of women living within the patriarchal society through “reversely”
translating the native cultures in her hometown Hulan County. And on the other hand, she
translates her own life experiences and memories, and puts a lot of emphasis on her feelings
of homelessness and displacement. In doing so, she makes the sense of desolation penetrate
the entire work, and combines her personal feelings of being homeless with her public
concern about Chinese women’s common fate. Through re-examining Xiao Hong’s literature

41
Xiao Hong. The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng& Tsui Company,
2002), 132.
29
from the perspective of translation, I argue that the foundation and the starting point of Xiao
Hong’s writings is her feminist self-consciousness as a woman writer. In the next sections,
bringing in two biopics of Xiao Hong into this study, I will consider the close, yet dangerous,
connection between Xiao Hong’s writings and the filmic presentations of them. Could the
literary foundation of Xiao Hong’s writings be faithfully revealed in the biopics? To what
extent are the filmmakers showing faithfulness to the original texts, and to what extent are
they betraying them? How would the areas of textual infidelity in the two biopics in resonate
with the filmmakers’ own subjectivities? These are the questions that I would address in the
following sections. To tackle these issues, I will, in the first place, consider the biopics not
only as a genre but as a method, and examine the unique development trajectory of Chinese
biopics.

The Biopics as Method
In his work Whose Lives Are They Anyway: Biopics as Contemporary Film Genre,
Dennis Bingham defines the biopic as a “genuine, dynamic” and “important” genre which
“narrates, exhibits, and celebrates the life of a subject”
42
. And he states that “at the heart of
the biopic is the urge to dramatize actuality and find in it the filmmaker’s own version of
truth.”
43
In this statement, Bingham stresses that, first, the actuality or reality in the biopics
might be a dramatized or negotiated one, and second, the creation of a biopic is based not
only on the subject’s personal history and life stories, but also on the filmmaker’s own

42
Dennis Bingham. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre
(Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10.
43
Ibid, 10.
30
interpretation. In this sense, a biopic could also be conceived as a translation or adaptation
process which derives from certain original texts including written biographies, memoirs,
correspondences or interviews of the subjects, and other possible materials, and develops on
the basis of the filmmaker’s own aesthetic selection and cinematic/literary creativity. Márta
Minier and Maddalena Pennachia take one step forward in their collection Adaptation,
Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic by pointing out “the relevance of directorial
style, the signature of the scriptwriter, the connotations of casting and other factors to do with
the making of the biopic”
44
can all be seen as the “elements of the film’s intertexuality.”
45

Since all these elements are having significant impacts on the formation of a biopic, the
initial definition of the biopic given by Bingham becomes problematic and questionable. Are
the biopics still “genuinely” created to “exhibit and celebrate” the historical truths, or more
specifically, the life of the subject only? Is it possible that the filmic representation of the
subject or the biographee is borrowed by the filmmaker to reveal his/her own life story or
thinking? Such questions may also relate back to the title of Bingham’s work: “Whose lives
are they anyway?” Do the lives projected on screen belong to the subject, the filmmaker, or
the spectator?
Biopics are difficult to be study as a genre because of their extreme complexity and
uniqueness. In 1992, George Frederick Custen attempted to characterize the biopic as a
certain film genre and equates it with the Hollywood studio biographical films which aim to

44
Márta Minier, Maddalena Pennacchia, ed. Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity
Biopic (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), 10.
45
Ibid, 10.
31
“create public history.”
46
Using Custen’s words, the biopic is “minimally composed of the
life, or the portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used,” but displays a “nearly
monochromatic Hollywood view of history
47
instead. Bingham challenges Custen’s
categorization of the biopic by claiming that “the biopic has evolved and gone through life-
cycle changes and continues to do so,” and different “phases have sometimes themselves
become subgenres.”
48
The contemporary biopic has departed from the “studio biopic” stage
that Custen focused on before, and is more and more dependent on the directors’ style. And
according to Márta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia’s analysis, since “determining the
sources (of the biopic) appears to be a case-by-case matter,”
49
it becomes more problematic
and dangerous to study the biopic as an entirety sharing common characteristics. Even though
determining whether the biopic could be considered as a film genre is not the goal of this
paper, I will focus on one certain kind of biopics as a subgenre, namely, the biopics about
writers, and consider such biopics as translations or adaptations due to their close attachment
to the original literary texts.

The Biopics in China
Chinese biopics have experienced a different developmental trajectory compared to their
Western counterparts. Instead of displaying a “Hollywood view of history,” Chinese biopics

46
George Frederick Custen. Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1992), 42.
47
Ibid, 42.
48
Dennis Bingham. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre
(Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10.
49
Márta Minier, Maddalena Pennacchia, ed. Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity
Biopic (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), 8.
32
were subordinated to their ideological functions and equated with the patriotic education
films (aiguo jiaoyu pian) for a long time. Taking the 2004 biopic Zhang Si-de for instance, it
portrays a common soldier Zhang Si-de (1915-1944)’s personal life and memorizes his
sacrifice and devotion to China’s liberation work. However, the film ignores Zhang’s
individual development background or his interior state, and yet solely focuses on his
selflessly helping other people. The lack of the motivation analysis of the subject makes the
whole film stay far away from the actuality and only seem like a propaganda work. And more
importantly, produced to celebrate Chairman Mao’s 1944 speech “To Serve the People” (Wei
renmin fuwu), this film thus uses a large amount of spaces to depict the close connection
between Mao and the common people like Zhang Si-de, and highlights Mao’s speech
delivered in 1944 in memory of Zhang Si-de. In this sense, this film is more like the
exhibition of Mao’s speech rather than of the subject’s life.
Like the film Zhang Si-de, many Chinese biographical films are closely linked to the
ideological discourses, and form a kind of grand historical narrative. According to Dexuan
Qu’s analysis, in Chinese biographical films, the subject’s “individuality was overshadowed
by the historical totality.”
50
The filmmakers tend to create some hero-like figures and to
observe them through the lens of certain historical events. Compared to faithfully recording
the subjects’ personal stories, they put more emphasis on showing faithfulness towards the
grand history, or in other words, the national history. In recent years, the biopics have

50
De-xuan Qu. “On Chinese Biography Films in New Century”. Dangdai Dianying, 2010, vol. 4: 54-
58.
33
wonderfully prospered “both at the box office and at award ceremonies”
51
in the Western
world. However, one could hardly discover the biopics as an independent film catalogue
while randomly browsing a popular Chinese video website like Youku and Iqiyi, let alone
enumerating a few successful biographical blockbusters today. Chinese biopics are
considered as lacking entertainment value and are less attractive to the audience probably due
to the grand historical narratives they mostly adopted. The majority of existing Chinese
biopics
52
are still inclined to tell the stories of some hero-like figures and to position them
under the nation’s developmental history and the socialist morality expectations, which make
them function more as a part of the ideological education than as a consumed production or
an art piece.
Despite the unpopularity of Chinese biopics, two films about the writer Xiao Hong were
released in succession following 100
th
birth anniversary of Xiao Hong’s birth in 2011.
Falling Flowers created by director Huo Jian-qi was released in 2012. And Hong Kong
director Ann Hui’s The Golden Era joined the National Day blockbuster films (guoqing
dang, 国庆档) in 2014 with 51.49 million RMB at the box office. Why did the two
filmmakers both choose Xiao Hong as their subject? Did they follow the Chinese biopic
narrative tradition? If considered as translations or adaptations based on Xiao Hong’s
literature, to what extent and for what reasons do these two films show faithfulness to or
betray the original texts? These are the questions I will consider in the following analysis.

51
Ellen Cheshire. Bio-pics: A Life in Pictures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 2.
52
For instance, the 2012 biopic Dr. Qian Xuesen tells the story of a great scientist Qian Xue-sen. It
focuses on Qian’s going back to China in the 1940s and his great contribution to Chinese atomic test.
The 2009 film Iron Man (“Tieren”) depicts the life of the model worker Wang Jin-xi and was released
on Labor Day as part of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC.
34

Translating Xiao Hong in her Biopics
In her analysis in Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelity, Rachel
Carroll states that “a film or television adaptation of a prior cultural text—no matter how
‘faithful’ in intention or aesthetic—is inevitably an interpretation of that text: to this extent,
every adaptation is an instance of textual infidelity.”
53
The biopics, especially the ones
closely linked to their literary origins, can be conceived as translations, which “involve a
process of selection and (re)arrangement, based on interpretation, on the makers’ take on the
subject.”
54
The filmic representations of the writer Xiao Hong in the two biopics, Falling
Flowers and The Golden Era, can also be studied within such a “biopic as translation”
framework. Even though Huo Jian-qi’s version shows faithfulness towards the historical
truths of Xiao Hong’s life, it actually betrays Xiao Hong’s literature and her identity as a
feminist writer by presenting the subject from a masculine perspective. It only substantiates
the filmmaker’s own imagination of Xiao Hong in line with the May Fourth male author’s
representation of women. On the other hand, Ann Hui’s The Golden Era serves an homage to
writer Xiao Hong, both aesthetically and ideologically; however, in the meantime, it also
submits to Ann Hui’s own self-expression, revealing Hui’s “accented” subjectivity as a Hong
Kong woman filmmaker. In this sense, the biopic of Xiao Hong as a translation is always a

53
Rachel Carroll. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (London: Continuum
International Publishing, 2009), 1.
54
Márta Minier, Maddalena Pennacchia, ed. Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity
Biopic (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), 11.
35
negotiated one: the literary origin, only as one of the intertextuality elements of the biopic, is
always in negotiation with the directorial aesthetic.
Huo Jian-qi’s Falling Flowers: A Triple Betrayal
To commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Xiao Hong’s birth, Heilongjiang
Radio and Television Administration and Beijing Tang-de Film Company recruited director
Huo Jian-qi to make a Xiao Hong biopic. According to Huo’s interview, his motivation for
making this film is to “do something for Xiao Hong” and to “let people rediscover her by
virtue of her love story.”
55
He also admitted that in this film he prioritized Xiao Hong’s love
stories above her wrings, and aimed to draw attention to Xiao Hong herself and then her
literature works. If we suppose that a biopic as a translation should be faithful to the original
literary texts, then Huo’s Falling Flowers can be read as a triple betrayal to Xiao Hong’s
original writings, both aesthetically and ideologically.
First, even though Huo Jian-qi utilizes the protagonist Xiao Hong’s first person point of
view to narrate the whole story and constructs the plots in this film based on Xiao Hong’s
autobiographical essays and stories, he actually recreates and even fictionalizes Xiao Hong’s
words and tone, and thus strays far away from her original writings. For instance, in her
autobiographical essay “Hungry,” Xiao Hong poignantly depicts her feelings of hunger and
destitution while she was living in Hotel Huropa in Harbin with her partner Xiao Jun. She
writes that:

55
Li Li. “Huo Jian-qi: Understand Her Works Through Understanding Her life”. Urumqi Wanbao,
accessed June 1
st
, 2020, http://roll.sohu.com/20130308/n368123761.shtml.
36
厕所房的电灯仍开着，和夜间⼀般昏黄，好像黎明还没有到来，可是“列巴圈”已经挂上别
⼈家的门了！有的⽜奶瓶也规规矩矩地等在别的房间外。只要⼀醒来，就可以随便吃
喝。但，这都只限于别⼈，是别⼈的事，与⾃⼰⽆关。
The lights in the toilet are still on, as dim as nighttime, as if dawn had not yet
arrived. But the Pakistan bread ring has already been hung on other ones’ doors. And
milk bottles are quietly standing outside some rooms. As long as those people wake
up, they could enjoy their food and drink. However, it only belongs to others, not my
business.
The extreme hunger leads her to be jealous of other people and even to think about stealing
their bread and milk:
全旅馆的三层楼都在睡中，越这样静越引诱我，我的那种想头越坚决。过道尚没有⼀点
声息，过道越静越引诱我，我的那种想头越想越充胀我：去拿吧！正是时候，即使是
偷，那就偷吧！
People in the entire floor are still in their dreams. The quietness induces me. That
kind of thought is filling me: Go ahead! Go steal it!
In Huo’s film, this scene is, to some extents, faithfully restored in which the protagonist Xiao
Hong steps out of her own room, secretly looks at the Pakistan Bread Ring hung on other
guests’ doors, and thinks about stealing it. The protagonist conclusively rephrases Xiao
Hong’s original writings by saying that:
我那时候最憎恨的，就是每天早晨挂在别的客房门上的列巴圈。新鲜⾯包的⾹味让饥饿
的⼈想去做贼，但内⼼又感到羞耻。
What I hated the most then was the bread ring hung on other one’s door. The smell
of fresh bread makes the hunger to become a thief.
Even though the filmmaker does not practice a word-for-word translation from the literary
source to the filmic representation, Xiao Hong’s feelings of destitution and shame is
realistically revealed here.
37
Nonetheless, in the following part, the scene is immediately switched to show the
protagonist Xiao Hong’s room where she is sitting behind the desk and writing something.
She delivers the following monologue:
我清楚地记得，每家楼顶上的⽩霜，还有玻璃窗上流淌着的⼀条⼀条的泪⽔。有时候⾛
在街上听到妓⼥们的欢笑，我都会羡慕她们。
I clearly remembered the white snow on every rooftop and the lines of tears on every
house’s windows. Sometimes, walking in the streets, hearing the laughter of the
prostitutes, I will be envious of them.
In Huo’s version, trapped in the feelings of hunger and destitution, the protagonist Xiao Hong
feels lonely and helpless, and even considers turning herself into a prostitute. Such an
assumption derives not only from Huo’s own imagination of Xiao Hong, but also from his
interpretation of Lu Xun’s “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?” speech in 1923. Huo’s
film refers to Lu Xun’s “Nora Leaving Home” three times. In the first place, while the
protagonist Xiao Hong is talking with the young intellectual Luo Bin-ji, she mentions her
escaping from the forced marriage and concludes that “it is the age of the ‘Noras’.” In
another scene, the filmmaker is capturing a women students’ class with the protagonist Xiao
Hong reading Lu Xun’s “Nora” essay as the background voiceover. And the third mention is
the invisible one here: the protagonist writes that she is even envious of the prostitutes. This
fictional statement seemingly resonates with Lu Xun’s stand that “Nora actually has two
alternatives only: to go to the bad or to return to her husband.”
56
However, it fails the
original texts in that the real intention of Lu Xun is to deny the possibility of women “living

56
Lu Xun, “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home’ from The Power of Weakness (New York: The
Feminist Press, 2007), 86.
38
on the sympathy of others”
57
, and to reiterate the necessity of reclaiming women’s economic
rights, instead of merely stressing women’s helplessness state.
In the meantime, Huo’s adaptation here inherits the subjective judging male gaze that a
lot of May Fourth male author adopted in order to represent women, and therefore, betrays
Xiao Hong’s feminist expression in which women can be the active observer and women’s
fate can be sympathized by other women. In her autobiographical essay “Hungry,” Xiao
Hong extends her personal suffering to showing sympathy towards other women’s miserable
fate. Following the depiction of her own hunger, Xiao Hong turns to write about a woman
beggar standing outside an herb shop, holding her child’s hand, and begging for money.
“Nobody from the herb shop cares about her, neither do the passers-by. It seems like they are
saying that it is not correct for her to have a child, for the poor to have children. They are
supposed to starve to death.”
58
And by connecting the woman beggar’s starving to her own
situation
59
, Xiao Hong attempts to sympathize with other women’s fate and criticize the
ruthlessness of the society. In this sense, even though Huo factually restores Xiao Hong’s
difficult situation living in Harbin, he fails to present Xiao Hong’s feminist sympathetic gaze
in her literary works which is much more significant in truthfully depicting Xiao Hong as a
writer.

57
Lu Xun, “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home’ from The Power of Weakness (New York: The
Feminist Press, 2007), 90.
58
Xiao Hong. “Hunger”. Xiao Hong Sanwen, accessed June 1
st
,
https://millionbook.net/xd/x/xiaohong/xhsw/008.htm
59
Ibid.

39
Second, in Falling Flowers, the filmmaker fantasizes about Xiao Hong’s romantic
relationships with other male writers, especially with Lu Xun, in ignorance of their literary
connections. Considering Lu Xun as her mentor in the literary world, Xiao Hong inherits
many of his viewpoints, and takes one step forward by creating the women narrators who
sympathize other women’s common fate and giving voice to women. In this sense, a lot of
Xiao Hong’s works could be seen related to Lu Xun’s texts. For instance, the young female
narrators in her works like Tales of Hulan River and the short story “Hands” are very similar
with the young male intellectual narrators in Lu Xun’s “New Year’s Sacrifice,” all of whom
witnesses the miserable fates of the women figures. And yet, distinct from the self-confession
of the male narrators in Lu Xun’s texts, Xiao Hong’s female narrators function to connect
with the women characters and to reach out the potential audiences, expressing the author’s
feminist viewpoints.
Nonetheless, while portraying Xiao Hong’s interactions with Lu Xun in Falling
Flowers, the filmmaker intentionally creates an ambiguity by confusing the mentorship with
an imagined inconspicuous sexual relationship. While the protagonist Xiao Hong is chatting
with Lu Xun’s wife, the camera uses a high angle to capture the character Lu Xun coming
downstairs and intruding upon the two women’s conversation. And in the next shot, the
character Lu Xun gives Xiao Hong the preface he writes for her novel. Right after Xiao Hong
thanks him, the character Lu Xun suggestively replies that “how?” Xiao Hong then looks at
Lu Xun’s wife and turns back to Lu Xun with a shy expression. Even though the character Lu
Xun then answers himself that Xiao Hong should thank him by cooking dumplings for him,
40
the previous gesture full of sexual suggestiveness still arouses the audience’s curiosity and
imagination.

Figure 1 The protagonist Xiao Hong is holding the preface the character Lu Xun writes for her
and is having a conversation with the character Lu Xun.

Third, the filmmaker inherits the tradition of filming Chinese biopics, or to be more
specific, of filming the patriotic education films. Huo still attempts to position writer Xiao
Hong’s personal story within the mainstream grand narrative and considers Xiao Hong’s life
through the lens of the history of Anti-Japanese War. In the opening scene, the city Hong
Kong is under an air-raid. The character Luo Bin-ji rushes against the crowd to go find Xiao
Hong. In the next scene, the protagonist Xiao Hong is lying down on the bed, ailing, fragile
and disheveled. By placing these two scenes side by side, the filmmaker deliberately looks at
Xiao Hong’s personal fate as the miniature of the whole nation’s fate. In this sense, Xiao
Hong’s image is scrutinized by the filmmaker’s male gaze and used to serve the filmmaker’s
ideological aims. Nonetheless, Xiao Hong’s literature works always keep a distance from the
41
leftist ideological expression. Instead, she would rather connect her personal life with the
common people’s, especially the common women’s fate.
Even though Huo Jian-qi’s Falling Flowers shows respect to the factual reality of writer
Xiao Hong’s life and the condition of that era, it still betrays Xiao Hong’s original texts
because, first, the filmmaker rewrites nearly all of Xiao Hong’s words and creates a kind of
aesthetic and ideological mismatch between the literary origins and the filmic representation.
Second, the filmmaker misinterprets on and fantasizes about Xiao Hong’s relationship with
other male writers instead of revealing their literary connections. Finally, the filmmaker
inherits the subjective judging gaze that some May Fourth male authors’ adopted to represent
women, which goes against Xiao Hong’s feminist literary legacy. The image of Xiao Hong in
Falling Flowers originates from the filmmaker’s own imagination of and (mis)interpretation
on Xiao Hong. In the following section, I will consider how the filmmaker used this image to
serve his masculine subjectivity and his ideological intention of filming a patriotic biopic in
an entertaining and erotic way.
A Patriotic and Masculine Melodrama
Invited by Heilongjiang Radio and Television Administration, and in memory of one of
the most talented women writers in Chinese literature history, Huo’s biopic on Xiao Hong
could be read through the lens of China’s cultural politics in recent years in which films are
domestically considered as a means of modernization especially in the rural areas
60
, and

60
For instance, one of the means is to release one free movie per month in some rural villages. See
Xinhuashe News. Accessed June 1
st
, 2020. http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2013-06/13/content_2425464.htm
42
internationally used to be a display of the soft power and of the “Chinese Style” (zhongguo
qipai). According to a document from Xinhua News Agency, one of the main challenges of
the Chinese films is to “preserve the Chinese cultural tradition and, in the meantime, to gain
recognitions from the international mainstream cultural market.”
61
Under such a
circumstance, Xiao Hong becomes a perfect film subject in fulfilling these goals in that she,
on the one hand, is a brilliant Chinese woman writer who is also paid attention by the
Western academia. And on the other hand, her own exilic story is exactly the miniature of the
nation’s anti-colonialism history. In Huo’s version, the protagonist Xiao Hong’s personal life
is positioned alongside the nation’s fate. In the opening scene, Xiao Hong’s ailing body
embodies the national tragedy. And the filmmaker also constructs Xiao Hong in the image of
a patriotic woman writer: in one scene, Xiao Hong wakes up in the dark hotel room, opens
the window curtains, and pays attention to the news spread outside—City Shenyang has
already fallen, and the war flames are coming towards Harbin. At this time, her fiancé Wang
is still in his dreams. Once he gets up, he forcefully closes the windows again, and shows no
attention to what is happening outside. Such a huge contrast between Xiao Hong and Wang
indicates their totally conflicting attitudes towards the nation, foretells their later breakup,
and, more importantly, highlights Xiao Hong’s patriotic awakening.
In addition to highlighting the wartime history and portraying the protagonist Xiao Hong
in resonance with the patriotic mainstream, the filmmaker also attempts to cater to the
audience’s taste by centralizing Xiao Hong’s several romantic relationships and observing

61
See Xinhuashe News. Accessed June 1
st
, 2020. http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2014-
12/22/content_2794812.html.
43
them with a masculine gaze. According to the director Huo Jian-qi’s interview, the
motivation to make this film is to “encourage the audience to rediscover Xiao Hong through
watching her love stories.”
62
Huo even blatantly claims that “no matter how brilliant her
[Xiao Hong’s] literature works are, they are not as interesting as her life, her love stories.”
63

In resonance with his statement, Huo not only dramatically focuses on the protagonist Xiao
Hong’s several romantic relationships, but also films them in an erotic means. For instance,
when her fiancé Wang finds Xiao Hong, he takes her to a hotel room and rapes her. When
Wang forcefully presses the protagonist Xiao Hong’s body against the window, the colorful
neon lights outside are flickering through the window and brightening the lady’s face. On the
one hand, the usage of the changing hazy neon lights beautifies the rape scene in an erotic
way. And on the other hand, the electric lighting within a metropolitan cityscape could be
read as a metaphor of the objectified women. And another significant sex scene happens
between Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun in an abandoned factory. The director, using a voyeuristic
gaze, films the two characters lying down and having sex in a nearly public space. And
similarly with the previous sex scene, in this scene the filmmaker adds some snowflakes
falling down from the broken roof, and thus deliberately embodies and amplifies the sexual
sensations. In doing so, the filmmaker successfully represents the protagonist Xiao Hong in a
masculinely attractive and entertaining way.

62
Li Li. “Huo Jian-qi: Understand Her Works Through Understanding Her life”. Urumqi Wanbao,
accessed June 1
st
, 2020, http://roll.sohu.com/20130308/n368123761.shtml.
63
Ibid.
44
In the meantime, instead of revealing Xiao Hong’s literary spirit or her feminist
expression, Falling Flowers could also be read as a male melodrama and the narrative
structure of the film signifies the male filmmaker’s masculine gaze. In this film, the
protagonist Xiao Hong is seemingly given the freedom of love and the access to her feminine
sexuality. Nonetheless, such a freedom is finally punished by the male-dominated morality.
Noticing Xiao Jun’s infidelity in their relationship, the protagonist Xiao Hong, with great
disappointment, decides to turn to another male writer Duan-mu. In a scene in which Xiao
Hong and Duan-mu are having a casual conversation and are imagining opening a coffee
shop together, the two characters, framed by hazy candle lights, talk about some trivial
materialistic details of their imagined coffee shop, such as the beautiful lights, decorations,
table settings, music, etc. In doing so, the filmmaker suggestively and fictionally equates
Xiao Hong’s turning to a new lover to her converting to bourgeois ideology. And right after
Xiao Hong and Duan-mu’s marriage, Xiao Hong realizes that her partner Duan-mu is not a
responsible person. In their exilic journeys, Duan-mu has abandoned Xiao Hong several
times. Xiao Hong has to give birth to her child alone and her child died young. In this sense,
the protagonist Xiao Hong is finally punished for her previous infidelity or inchastity by the
patriarchal codes, even though Xiao Jun is the one who actually betrays their relationship in
the first place.

Ann Hui’s The Golden Era: An Homage to Xiao Hong’s Literature
45
Ann Hui’s The Golden Era can be regarded as a postmodernist biographical
experimentation in that it, on the one hand, challenges the mainstream Hollywood studio
biopic tradition in which the biopic “often opens in medias res,” and is “set within a
historically accurate mis-en-scène and includes additional ‘signifiers of facticity’ such as an
introductory assertion of truth.”
64
On the other hand, it subverts the conventional grand
historical narrative adopted by the Chinese patriotic biopics in which the protagonists’ fates
are overshadowed by the presentation of the nation’s history. Differentiating itself from these
two kinds of narratives, The Golden Era begins with the protagonist Xiao Hong’s
posthumously autobiographical narration: sitting or standing against a purely dark
background, the protagonist Xiao Hong, filmed in black-and-white, slowly introduces herself,
including not only her birthday on June 1
st
in 1911 but also her early death on January 22
nd
in
1942, without showing any facial expression or emotion. In contrast with the diverse use of
colors throughout the entire film, the black-and-white portrayal of Xiao Hong in the opening
scene can be read, first, as her posthumous image, or in other words, the ghost image of her;
and second, as the personification of her literature or her literary spirit. No matter which one
is the filmmaker’s real intention, these two kinds of interpretations both lead to the director
Ann Hui’s homage to Xiao Hong as a writer, and a declaration of faithfulness to her literature
and life. Such a declaration can also be found in Hui’s own interview. She said that, as early
as her twentieth, she would like to make a film about Xiao Hong and the era she lived in.
65

64
George Frederick Custen. Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1992), 47.
65
“A Conversation between Wang An-yi and Ann Hui”. Jiangnan Shibao. Accessed June 1
st
, 2020.
https://cul.qq.com/a/20140418/007749.htm
46

Figure 2 The protagonist Xiao Hong’s posthumous self-introduction in the opening scene.

In the meantime, the techniques adopted by Ann Hui in this film also embodies her
faithfulness in intention. First of all, Hui adopts a lot of Xiao Hong’s writings to narrate the
story in this film. According to her own interview, “80 percent of the contents of the film
originates from her [Xiao Hong’s] and her friends’ writings.” What the filmmaker aims to do
is to “faithfully present the original sources on screen.”
66

Second, I argue that Hui deliberately utilizes a mismatch between the voiceovers/
literary texts and the color on screen to embody and exaggerate the sense of desolation
emphasized by Xiao Hong in her autobiographical writings. Right after the opening scene,
the film turns to use a bright color to showcase the backyard garden in Xiao Hong’s
grandfather’s place and a little girl playing in it, with the selected verses from Tales of Hulan
River as the background voiceover. On the one hand, this gesture indicates that the filmmaker
is tracing Xiao Hong’s life from the childhood time depicted in her own autobiographical

66
“A Conversation between Wang An-yi and Ann Hui”. Jiangnan Shibao. Accessed June 1
st
, 2020.
https://cul.qq.com/a/20140418/007749.html.
47
writings. And on the other hand, by selecting one of the most important conclusions in Tales
of Hulan River that “our compound was a dreary/ desolate one”, the filmmaker also sets up a
sad tragic tone as the foundation of the film. In the next following scene, the filmmaker,
using the colors of gray and blue, captures a dim compact room where Xiao Hong and Xiao
Jun sit opposite to each other talking about their absent mothers. And after that, the film goes
back to Xiao Hong’s childhood time, and depicts her interactions with her grandfather. Even
though the voiceover used here exemplifies the love and care her grandfather gives to Xiao
Hong, the continuous blue-and-gray color foretells the sad fact that Xiao Hong will lose her
forever home after her grandfather passes away. The mismatch between the voiceover and
the color explains that even when Xiao Hong is depicting something warm and happy, the
feeling of desolation and loneliness still haunts it. Therefore, such a filmic practice complies
with Xiao Hong’s repetitive literary themes in translating her own life which is, as I
mentioned before, the feeling of desolation and the theme of “mourning the lost home” which
runs through all of her autobiographical writings.

48
Figure 3 The filmmaker utilizes a bright color to depict the protagonist Xiao Hong’s childhood
and her grandfather’s backyard garden, and yet selects a sad statement from Tales of Hulan
River as the background voice over.

Figure 4 The filmmaker uses the colors of blue and gray to set up a desolate tone following the
portrayal of the backyard garden, and thus forms a huge contrast.

Third, the filmmaker adopts a non-linear narrative structure to fulfill the storytelling in
The Golden Era, which resonates with Xiao Hong’s fragmented narrative style in her original
writings. Using the previous sequence as an example, the opening scene happens after Xiao
Hong’s death while the following ones quickly switches between Xiao Hong’s childhood and
adulthood. Rey Chow argues that within the May Fourth context, the writer’s “self-
consciousness is inextricably linked to the position of being a spectator.”
67
And she
considers “the abrupt sentences and compressed descriptions” as Xiao Hong’s writing styles,
which are “embedded in the larger epistemological problems of technologized visuality.”
68

That is to say, Xiao Hong as well as other writers’ writings are influenced by the newly

67
Rey Chow. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 9.
68
Ibid, 15.
49
developed Chinese film medium. In this sense, Hui has discovered a creative and useful
means—the swiftly changing montage scenes in a non-linear narrative—to effectively and
aesthetically restore the writing style in Xiao Hong’s writings.
In addition to the technical applications and the aesthetical restoration practiced in The
Golden Era, the filmmaker also attempts to ideologically show faithfulness towards Xiao
Hong’s literature. In a scene in which the protagonist Xiao Hong is having a conversation
with the character Ding Ling, who was also a famous May Fourth female author, Ding Ling
declares that she has decided to give up writing, and to devote her life to writing a “greater
book”, in other words, to the national revolution and liberation. The protagonist Xiao Hong
listens to Ding Ling’s encouraging speech, however, never expresses her own attitude. At the
end of this conversation, the protagonist Xiao Hong turns her gaze away from Ding Ling to
the camera. She silently looks at the spectator as if she has something to say. Such a gesture,
one the one hand, indicates that, even without a word, Xiao Hong already has an ideological
disagreement with Ding Ling. On the other hand, it breaks up the fourth wall between the
characters and the audience, and reveals the protagonist Xiao Hong as a psychological
subject, consequently highlighting Xiao Hong’s future decision to keep a distance from
patriotic writing.
50

Figure 5 Xiao Hong is gazing at the camera while she is having a conversation with Ding Ling.

And in the following scenes, her partner Xiao Jun states that, not satisfied by only being a
writer, he actually wants to be a soldier just like Ding Ling. And then Xiao Hong finally
speaks out her pursuit by saying that,
你知道我别⽆所求，我只想有个安静的环境写写东西。
You know that all I want is to have a peaceful place to write something.
Even though categorized as a member of the leftist writers’ league, Xiao Hong’s writings
factually differ from her counterparts. As I analyzed before, her writings stay far away from
the themes of resistance and revolution on a national scale, but instead feature the
individuality, the concern about common people’s fate, and her progressive feminist
expressions.
Even though Ann Hui never directly showcases Xiao Hong’s ideological orientations, I
argue that she, to some extents, attempts to faithfully reveal Xiao Hong’s ideological pursuit
in The Golden Era. There are two scenes that could be metaphorically interpreted as the
embodiment of Xiao Hong’s ideological stand. The first one is when Xiao Hong and Xiao
51
Jun are having dinner in a cheap restaurant full of rickshaw pullers and bottom-class workers.
Xiao Jun arranges Xiao Hong to sit closely next to an old rickshaw puller. It is apparently the
first time for her to stay in such an environment. The camera captures that Xiao Hong is
curiously observing the people around her. And then the camera pans to show the observed
subjects in Xiao Hong’s eyes: the crowds are chatting loudly, wolfing down their meals, and
leaving immediately for their work. In doing so, the filmmaker probably indicates that Xiao
Hong may one day record these common people in her writings, and her life as a writer is
closely connected with these common people’s fates.
With regards to Xiao Hong’s feminist expression, one scene in The Golden Era could be
read as a substantiation. Xiao Hong is imprisoned in Hotel Dong-xing-shun and nobody
could save her by paying the huge amount of debts. The filmmaker utilizes the colors of blue
and gray in filming her compact confined room is blue and gray. And in the next scene, the
camera turns to film the outside world: the streets are all flooded, and a few children are
playing with water. And the color of this scene changes to a bright one with a melodic guitar
music as the background. Xiao Hong is leaning against the window and smoking a cigarette
with a carefree expression. Instead of waiting for other ones to save her, Xiao Hong, about to
give birth at this moment, waves to a boat rower, climbs down the iron ladder behind a neon
light, and jumps down to the boat. In contrast with Huo Jian-qi’s version in which the
protagonist Xiao Hong desperately waits for Xiao Jun’s help and even insists going back to
retrieve Xiao Jun’s address on the boat, the protagonist Xiao Hong here gains more
independence and feminist freedom from Ann Hui’s perspective.
52
Ann Hui’s “Accented” Subjectivity
In his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Hamid Naficy
brings up the idea of “accented cinema” which could be defined as the movies “operated
independently, outside the studio system or the mainstream film industries.”
69
Naficy
characterizes the “accented cinema” as stemming from the filmmakers’ “liminal subjectivity
and interstitial location in society and the film industry”
70
, and narrows it down to the exilic,
diasporic, and ethnic films based on the nuances of the filmmakers’ different identities and
structures of feelings. However, no matter which certain type an “accented cinema” may
belong to, it always aesthetically responds to the filmmaker’s experience of displacement.
Following Nacify’s analysis, I argue that The Golden Era could be considered an “accented
film” because of, first, the filmmaker Ann Hui’s own diasporic subjectivity; second, the
filmic symbolization of Hong Kong culture as a disappearing one; and third, the feminist
approach that distinguishes it from the male-dominated film industry.
Even though Ann Hui could hardly be considered as living in exile or diaspora, she does
have the experience of displacement and always positions it as a signature in her films. Ann
Hui was born in Manchuria to an ethnic hybridity family: her mother is a Japanese while her
father is a Chinese. Ann Hui “grew up in Macau and Hong Kong, majored in English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong,” and then “did further film studies in
England.”
71
Such an experience of living with diverse cultures influences Hui’s directorial

69
Hamid Naficy. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 10.
70
Hamid Naficy. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 10.
71
Gina Marchetti, “Feminism, Postfeminist, and Hong Kong Women Filmmakers”. A Companion to
Hong Kong Cinema (Malden: John Wiley& Sons,2015), 239.
53
style and could be most obviously seen in her semi-autobiographical film Song of the
Exile(1990) in which the protagonist Hue-yin, as the reflection of Hui herself, goes back to
Hong Kong from England, visits her mother’s homeland Japan, and finally gets reconciled
with her mother after many years of misunderstanding. Through paralleling the family
romance to a “social allegory”, according to Ackbar Abbas, Hui aims to “show the emotional
confusions about ‘home’ that result from a rapidly changing cultural space.”
72
Sharing some
commonalities in terms of technique and thematic choice, I argue that The Golden Era could
be conceived as an extension of Song of the Exile, both of which highlight the feelings of
displacement and the theme of “lost homeland.” In both of these two biographical works, Hui
utilizes non-linear narratives as well as a large amount of flashbacks to depict the protagonist
Hui-yin’s and the protagonist Xiao Hong’s life stories. In Song of the Exile, Hue-yin dwells
in the memories of her living with her grandparents in Macau, and feels a huge loss after she
goes back to Hong Kong and lives with her parents. She then expels herself from the so-
called family and lives in a boarding school. Throughout the entire story, Hue-yin is
continuously rethinking her understanding of “home”. And even though she seemingly re-
admits Hong Kong as her homeland in the end, such a recognition is suddenly interrupted by
her visit to her grandparents’ place in Guangzhou and by the haunting childhood memories.
In doing so, the filmmaker indicates the impossibility of home search once one has lived in
exile. Such a “lost home” theme is reiterated in The Golden Era by Hui’s faithfully
translating the sense of desolation in Xiao Hong’s texts. In this sense, it becomes dangerous

72
Ackbar Abbas. Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 38.
54
to consider The Golden Era merely as a representation of Xiao Hong’s life. It simultaneously
functions as a self-reflection/ self-depiction of the filmmaker Ann Hui’s personal displaced
life as well, and thus as an accented film.
Second, although the title of the film “the golden era” originates from Xiao Hong’s own
words in her correspondence with Xiao Jun, I argue that, from the filmmaker’s perspective,
the golden era presented in this film could also refer to the cultural space of Hong Kong as an
idealistic, and simultaneously disappearing utopia. In his book Hong Kong: Culture and the
Politics of Disappearance Ackbar Abbas examines “the manifold relations between cultural
forms in Hong Kong… and the cultural space of the city,”
73
and considers the cultural space
of Hong Kong as “a space of disappearance.”
74
Abbas argues that “the change in status of
culture in Hong Kong” could be described as “from reverse hallucination, which sees only
desert, to a culture of disappearance, whose appearance is posited on the imminence of its
disappearance.”
75
In other words, under British colonialism, Hong Kong could hardly form
its own cultural self-recognition. However, once Hong Kong gets rid of the colonialism state,
its cultural space has to face another question: will the “Hong Kong way of life with its
mixture of colonialist and democratic trappings” be in “imminent danger of disappearing”
76

after 1997 hand-over? In resonance of such a question, a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers
urgently reveal the mainlandization of Hong Kong in their works and considers the
possibilities or impossibilities of preserving Hong Kong culture. Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile

73
Ackbar Abbas. Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.
74
Ibid, 1.
75
Ibid, 7. Using the phrase “reverse hallucination”, Abbas refers to “not seeing what is there.”
76
Ibid, 7.
55
is one of them in that the complex relations between Mainland, Hong Kong, and Britain are
embodied by the protagonist Hue-yin’s personal journey. And the unrecognizable future of
Hong Kong is symbolized by Hue-yin’s continuously questioning about “home” throughout
the entire story.
Similar with the semi-autobiographical approach in Song of the Exile, The Golden Era
could also be conceived as Ann Hui’s reflection on Hong Kong culture, in spite of the fact
that the film is based on the writer Xiao Hong’s real life and literature and is produced in
collaboration with the mainland production team and film stars. In this film, the idea of “the
golden era” is brought up by the protagonist Xiao Hong in an ironical and controversial way.
While the protagonist Xiao Hong is temporarily living in Japan, ailing and lonely, she instead
says that “it is really my golden era”, and immediately adds that “I am spending it in a cage.”
The filmmaker utilizes the color blue to portray Xiao Hong’s feelings of loneliness,
otherness, and desolation while she is living in Japan, which is obviously controversial with
her realization of the “golden era”. In this sense, I suppose that the “golden era” actually
means a kind of nostalgic thinking: the protagonist Xiao Hong is missing the days she spent
in Harbin with Xiao Jun as well as other cohort writers. Xiao Hong only recognizes her
golden era after she realizes that she could never go back to the utopia again. It may also
symbolize the culture of disappearance of Hong Kong. In this sense, The Golden Era could
be conceived as an accented film full of the filmmaker’s subjective interpretations on Hong
Kong culture as a displaced entirety.
Finally, I argue that the “accent” of The Golden Era also dwells on the feminist
approach Ann Hui adopts in filming a female biopic, and distinguishes it from the “standard,
56
neutral, value-free” male-dominated cinema industry.
77
Bingham categorizes the male
biopics and the female biopics as two different genres in that “films about men have gone
from celebratory to warts-and-all to investigatory to postmodern and parodic”, and “biopics
of women, on the other hand, are weighted down by myths of suffering, victimization, and
failure perpetuated by a culture whose films reveal an acute fear of women in the public
realm.”
78
In order to challenge such a gendered tradition (the fear of presenting women’s
great achievements) in making female biopics, Ann Hui utilizes a totally opposite mode in
The Golden Era to re-canonize Xiao Hong’s status in Chinese literature history: Hui
fictionalizes a lot of interviews with the influential writers and critics who had some
interactions with Xiao Hong, and borrows their voices to recognize the great literary
achievement Xiao Hong gained. And as I mentioned before, compared to Huo Jian-qi’s
version in which the filmmaker positions the ailing and fragile image of Xiao Hong under a
male observer (Luo Bin-ji)’s gaze in the first place, Ann Hui always centralizes Xiao Hong’s
independence as a woman. The perfect example is the totally opposite depiction of Xiao
Hong’s escaping from the confinement in Hotel Dong-xing-shun: From Huo’s perspective,
Xiao Hong is the impotent one who is desperately waiting for a male savior, however, in Ann
Hui’s eyes, she is such an optimistic and strong woman who is capable of climbing down
from the high window in spite of her late pregnancy.

77
Hamid Naficy. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 23.
78
Dennis Bingham. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre
(Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10.
57
Conclusion
Underestimated and read as the leftist ideological writings for a long time, Xiao Hong’s
literatures urgently needs to be rediscovered and reexamined. Considering her
autobiographical writings from the perspective of the “reverse translation”, this paper
analyzes the feminist literary foundation of her writings. On the one hand, in her
autobiographical novel Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong adopts an outsider’s gaze and
translates a lot of old customs and native culture in her hometown in order not to directly
embody the themes of resistance or revolution, but to reveal her concerns about women’s
fatality within a traditional patriarchal society. On the other hand, Xiao Hong translates her
own life experiences and memories with the emphasis on reporting the sense of desolation
and displacement of her as a woman losing her forever home. Even though she is seemingly
expressing a private self here, the sense of desolation could also be linked back to her
feminist thinking and her sympathizing with women’s common fatality: within a ruthless
patriarchal society, once a woman decides to leave home, she will never be truly accepted
again. And in the meantime, Xiao Hong attempts to create a plurality of women’s voice by
using a double-narrator structure and presenting two co-existing temporalities: from the adult
outsider narrator’s viewpoint, Xiao Hong expresses her critiques against the patriarchal
society and directly reaches out to the readership or the spectatorship; and adopting the little
girl’s tone, she creates another narrator who has some direct interactions with the characters,
especially with the women characters, and speaks out for them. Uniting the women
characters, the narrator(s), and the potential readers/ spectators as a feminist entirety, Xiao
58
Hong also encourages women to speak out for women just like the little girl narrator speaks
out for the miserable child bride in Tales of Hulan River.
With the two biopics, Huo Jian-qi’s Falling Flowers and Ann Hui’s The Golden Era,
bringing Xiao Hong and her literatures back to focus, some new issues subsequently occur:
how could Xiao Hong’s image be presented faithfully on screen? How could the biopics
address the literary foundation of Xiao Hong’s writings? In what means could the filmmakers
deal with the close, yet dangerous, connection between the literary origins and the filmic
revelations of them? Through closely reading the two biopics, this paper considers Huo Jian-
qi’s Falling Flowers as showing faithfulness towards the historical truths of Xiao Hong’s life
and era, and yet a betrayal against Xiao Hong’s literature and her feminist expression. The
restoration of Xiao Hong’s image is subordinate to the director’s intention to film a patriotic
biopic in an entertaining and masculine way. On the other hand, Ann Hui’s The Golden Era
could largely be seen as a faithful translation of and an homage to writer Xiao Hong and her
literature, both aesthetically and ideologically. Hui not only utilizes Xiao Hong’s original
texts to narrate nearly the whole story, but also accurately reflects the themes of Xiao Hong’s
writings: the sense of desolation, the concerns about common people, and the feminist
perspective. However, in spite of the fact that The Golden Era is strictly based on the subject
Xiao Hong’s life, it also inevitably submits to the filmmaker Ann Hui’s self-expression.
Focusing on the exile and the sense of desolation, The Golden Era could also be seen as the
filmmaker’s reflection on Hong Kong culture of disappearance and Hui’s own expression of
her “accented” subjectivity. Since Ann Hui shares a lot of similarities with Xiao Hong,
79

79
Ann Hui was born in Manchuria to an ethnic hybridity family, and grew up in Hong Kong; even
59
Hui’s self-expression in this biopic is perfectly resonating with the revelation of Xiao Hong’s
image, and thus becomes nearly invisible. In this sense, the biopic as a translation is always a
negotiated one: the literary origin, only as one of the intertextual elements of the biopic, is
always in negotiation with the directorial aesthetic.

though she is never in exile, she is influenced by diverse cultures since she studied in England; and
more importantly Hui is also a filmmaker with feminist concerns and focuses on addressing the
women’s situations.
60
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Creator Shao, Yuxuan (author)

Core Title Xiao Hong on screen: autobiography, translation, and textual infidelity in her biopics

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Publication Date 09/15/2020

Defense Date 07/30/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ann Hui,autobiography,biopic,Chinese literature,female writer,film study,OAI-PMH Harvest,translation,Xiao Hong

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bernards, Brian (committee chair), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Fiss, Geraldine (committee member)

Creator Email beckyshaoyx@gmail.com,yshao@usc.edu

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