chapter 5 Recurring Fate in Two Films: Life after Life and Reincarnation of Golden Lotus

Kaby Wing-Sze Kung

Many historians have blamed beautiful women in ancient Chinese history for causing the collapse of empires by distracting emperors with their beauty and, therefore, causing them to become incapable of concentrating on ruling their kingdoms.1 Owing to these historians’ negative portrayals of women, women with astonishing beauty have often been regarded as femmes fatales, and many beautiful women in history have experienced unfortunate fates. In light of this, it is not surprising to see that the four most beautiful women in Chinese his- tory, 西施, Zhaojun 王昭君, Diao Chan 貂蟬, and 楊貴 妃, all had tragic endings.2 These historical Chinese beauties were blamed for the downfall of empires despite the fact that the emperors were not faultless in the administration of their kingdoms. A common expression for femme fatale is whose beauty is worth a nation “qing guo qing cheng” 傾國傾城 (one whose smile brings the fall of a nation or a city).3

1 See OuyangXiu 歐陽修 and Song Qi 宋祁, XinTangshu 新唐書 (Book of NewTang) [Woman leads to disaster] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 154. See also XinWudai shi 新五代史 (New history of the Five Dynasties) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 127: “Beautiful women lead to the downfall of a kingdom. Starting from Nüwa, the most serious disaster will cause the down- fall of the kingdom, one’s family and lead to one’s death.” 2 Xi Shi (Age of Disunion), (), Diao Chan (Three Kingdoms), and Yang Guifei (Tang dynasty). 3 This phrase first appeared in Han Shu 漢書 (). Cited in Anne McLaren, The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1994), 1. However, the legend of 褒姒 should be regarded the origin of the saying—“a beautiful woman’s smile brings the fall of a city or a nation.” Bao Si was the beautiful queen of King You of Zhou 周幽 王 who refused to smile after marrying the king. In order to see her smile, the king was willing to pay any price including fooling his lords. One day, King You pretended there was an emer- gency, and he lighted a signal fire on the beacon tower to summon his lords and their troops. Witnessing the whole incident, Bao Si burst out laughing when she saw the confusion of the lords and their troops upon their arrival at the beacon tower. In order to make Bao Si to smile again, Kong You tricked the lords repeatedly, in the end, no lords came to the rescue when the nomads invaded. This legend indicates the pun of “qing guo qing cheng”—the smile of a beautiful woman is worth the fall of a city, but it also means the smile of a woman

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427570_007 100 kung

Seeing that all the official historians in ancient China were men, it is not unreasonable to conclude that these historians made women into scapegoats for the downfall of the given dynasty. Under patriarchal hegemony, female beauty can be interpreted as a lethal weapon against men. It is uncontroversial to say that the concept of fate in Chinese culture is a “gendered fate.”4 Accord- ing to Deirdre Sabina Knight,

While fatalistic discourses harm all people, they play a particular role in mystifying the oppression of women. A concept such as ming [fate] may appear to be indifferent along lines of gender, yet frames of refer- ence, norms, values, ideals and emotional patterns that the discourse of fate reproduces for woman differ systemically from those it allows for men.5

Based on Knight’s comment, this chapter aims to investigate how women have been portrayed as vehicles for the execution of recurring fate and reincarna- tion in Chinese culture by examining two Hong Kong New Wave films: Peter Yung’s Life after Life 再生人 (Zaisheng ren, 1981) and Clara Law’s Reincarnation of GoldenLotus 潘金蓮之前世今生 (Panjinlian zhi qianshi jinsehng, 1989). Both Yung and Law deal with the concept of past lives affecting characters’ current lives; in other words, the Buddhist concept of karma is the subject matter of their films in which women are often the cause of men’s downfalls.6 A compar- ison of the two films will show how the two directors deal with the concepts of fate and fatalism differently.

1 Gendered Fate: Beautiful Chinese Women as the Executors of Recurring Fate

Life after Life is a story about an American-born Chinese man, Ray, who is a stage organizer who discovers that his past life has affected his current life and that it is inevitable that he will be murdered again by his wife who was also

costed the fall of a nation. Cited in Cho Kyo, The Search for the Beautiful Woman: A Cultural History of Japanese and Chinese Beauty, trans. Kyoko Selden (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 44. 4 Deirdre Sabina Knight, “Gendered Fate,” in The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture, ed. Christopher Lupke (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 272. 5 Ibid., 273. 6 I will explain the notion of karma in detail in the second section of this chapter.