Taiwanese Director Ang Lee's Creative Trajectory Exemplifies the Growing

Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World

Rong Cai

Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s creative trajectory exemplifies the growing trend of cross-cultural transmission. The most successful example of Lee’s border crossing in the era of globalization is without a doubt Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his first martial arts film. Only four months after it opened in December 2000, Crouching Tiger had grossed nearly $120 million and received almost universally enthusiastic reviews.1 It created a sensation at Cannes, claimed two awards at the Golden Globes, and eventually made a sweep at the Academy Awards for best cinematography, best original score, best art direction, and best foreign film. Much of the film’s attraction and visual pleasure comes from its female characters—Yu Xiulian (Yu Shu Lien), Yu Jiaolong (Jen Yu), and Jade Fox—whose interactions constitute the dramatic core of the plot, with each action sequence involving at least one of the trio. The “indomitable,” “fierce and relentless” fighters, to borrow a few of the critics’ epithets, are indeed

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spectacular: they run up walls, glide across water, and fly over rooftops; they jump, kick, and punch—viewers get an eyeful. Audiences familiar with the martial arts genre readily recognize these women as mirror images of the fighting females in the Hong Kong martial arts movies exported in large quantities to Southeast Asia and widely available through the video market in the West. However, despite the kung fu craze of the 1970s, in the United States the influence of Hong Kong martial arts cinema was limited mainly to marginalized audiences in inner-city theaters, such as blacks, Chinese-speaking viewers in Chinatowns, and restless adolescents. Well- known directors and actors from Hong Kong developed cult followings both at home and abroad,2 but it was not until the late 1980s that the genre gained the interest and respect of the mainstream and Hollywood began appropriating Hong Kong talent and action in its productions.3 The success of the Disney animated feature Mulan (1998) further popularized the image of the Chinese woman warrior, turning it into a profitable commodity.4 Pre- cisely because the fighting woman and the martial arts genre that sets her off from traditional femininity have become broadly consumed signs in global circulation, a case of a native particular made universal (as Roland Robertson would say about globalization), it is all the more important that we interpret unorthodox expressions delivered across cultural barriers.5 In what has become a canonical text in feminist criticism, Laura Mulvey argues that the cinematic experience is a voyeuristic activity producing erotic pleasure, and the pleasure in looking occurs in cinema, as in real life, between the active/male and the passive/female. The projection of phallic desire, the beautiful woman onscreen takes on an exhibitionist role as a display, a spectacle, and a sign of sexual difference “coded for strong visual and erotic impact.”6 Although her focus on sexual difference has ruptured the nongendered metapsychology of cinema propounded by some film theorists, the unitary vision embedded in Mulvey’s premise has itself become an issue of dissension. Bell hooks raises poignant questions about the homogeneity assumed by the Mulveyan paradigm, which was built on the roles of middle- class white women in classic Hollywood films: “Despite feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the category ‘woman’ which highlight the significance of race, many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about ‘women’ when in actuality it speaks

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only about white women.”7 The orthodox theorization of sexual difference, many also point out, excludes options that seek to explore the distinctions in alternative dimensions, such as social class, age, and sexual preference, as practiced in black and queer cinemas.8 The attention to the ethnic other in transnational representations yields yet more approaches to the female difference. In her critique of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor, ReyChowmaintainsthatthedirector’sfilmicstrategiesinportrayingChina’s last feudal ruler, Pu Yi, are similar to those adopted by early Hollywood in representing the female. The “aroused, caressing strokes” of Bertolucci’s camera “eroticize” and “feminize” China-as-spectacle.9 The fragmentation and re-visions introduced by the postmodernist and postcolonial positions identify multiple sites where the female as a discursive image can be theorized and dissected, engaging both the study of gender politics and the politics of gender studies. An investigation of the woman and difference must be anchored in the cultural, historical, and discursive contexts that make these categories signify.10 The Chinese female warrior, for example, presents a unique problematic. She falls largely outside the paradigms charted by the approaches I have described. The martial arts (wuxia) discourse often marginalizes, or makes inadequate or irrelevant, the loci in which many feminist readings contest the inscriptions of the female and difference—namely, romance, home, maternity, family, sexuality, sexual preference, class, race, and age. Its genre conventions short-circuit familiar critical currents, displacing women from the recognized realms, allowing them to fight alongside men and to possess as much physical prowess as their male counterparts in a fictitious world. The wuxia imagination is radically different in its representation of women, but is it free of gender considera- tions? In other words, how do gender and sexual transgressions signify in the iconoclastic wuxia world? When the traditional paradigms of domesticity and female sexuality no longer apply, in what terms do we address these issues? To approach gender images in martial arts discourse, we must pay attention to the cultural and representational traditions that informed their construction. Crouching Tiger, like many movies in the genre, is an adapta- tion of martial arts fiction and owes much to its predecessors in Hong Kong cinema.11 The representational traditions we should consider in our study

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of the woman warrior and gender sensibility in martial arts discourse thus include (at least) two signifying practices: cinema and literature. Attention to the ideological and formal priorities in these traditions will help us situate the martial arts imagination properly in its discursive histories, locating our critique in a thematic matrix most pertinent to the practices that shaped its production, and will alert us to the discursive means that enable these practices to signify and impose meanings. Because of the rich tradition and colorful practices of martial arts representations, a comprehensive study is beyond the scope of this article. I ground my investigation of the gender imaginations in the genre in three instances. I start with the female knight in early texts, analyzing how classic Tang (618–907) chivalric tales mask and rationalize the transgressions of the female knight to diffuse gender tensions, thereby identifying the character- istics of the woman warrior. I then examine the female image in Crouching Tiger. Unlike the sexualized beauties in the classic Hollywood films studied by early feminist critics, the Chinese woman warrior, I point out, is a spectacle of misplaced ambitions and problematic desires. Identifying the female desire in the film as a gender trespass, a usurpation of male power and male authority, I discuss how it acquires an outside and, thereby, meaning as a set of visual images to be appropriated by the audience. The last section centers on gender with a twist—the imaging of deviancy—in martial arts representation. Focusing on the gender-bending characters in two Hong Kong films, The Bride with White Hair (1993) and The East Is Red (1993), I explore the politics in the encoding of the monstrous body that exists outside gender categories. I argue that the construction of deviancy reveals a deep anxiety in the social imagination over the uncertain, nefarious space between the sexes. The strategy of accentuating the cultural specificities of the woman-warrior-as-spectacle in Chinese tradition and subjecting the martial arts imagination to close scrutiny will, I hope, call our attention to the gender significations in cross-cultural transmissions, increasing our awareness and power as spectators in a global cinema.

The Wuxia World and the Female Knight The woman warrior and her representational model, the knight-errant, are stock images in the martial arts (wuxia) world, a prominent part of China’s

literary tradition dating back to the writings of Han Fei (280–233 BC) and Sima Qian (186–145 BC). Wu refers to a person’s physical prowess and mastery of martial arts. Xia stands for a chivalrous hero who defies legal and social conventions in his quest for justice, honor, and personal ambitions.12 The knight-errant, popularized over the centuries in a variety of art forms (most notably fiction and drama), became a glamorized cultural icon, a larger-than-life hero who could right wrongs when the law failed to protect people from injustice and the abuse of power. The wuxia imagination is thus in essence a wish fulfillment, for it is a projection of popular desire. Fantastic in nature and nonconformist in ideological orientation, the wuxia world is more imaginary than reflective in its relation to the real world. The chivalrous heroes travel in the world of Jianghu (literally, rivers and lakes), a fantasized space with multiple layers and dimensions in wuxia literature—an imaginary world within an imaginary world. A symbolic territory with no physical, professional, or class boundaries, Jianghu is ruled and sustained by certain ethical principles and behavioral codes by which the knights-errant recognize and judge one another, making friends or foes. Personal obligations, such as loyalty to one’s master and friends, lead to intertwined networks among the knights, who are bound by a code of honor to avenge their allies.13 Chivalric justice in the Jianghu world therefore often has no public relevance, though writers tend to moralize the conflicts to enhance the stories’ appeal to readers. The knights’ interactions with orthodoxy, another attraction of the wuxia genre, are as exciting as their private acts of vengeance. The unconventional world of Jianghu was often believed to stand in sharp opposition to the oppressive official world of corruption and injustice, hence its resonance with the public. The depiction of exceptional women is a conspicuous feature of this subversive wuxia imagination. Female warriors have been part of the Chinese knight-errant tradition since ancient times. James Liu cites the maiden of Yue, the instructor of the king’s troops in the Annals of the Kingdom of Wu and Yue (Wu Yue chunqiu) by Zhao Ye (first century AD), as a forerunner of the heroic women portrayed in Tang times.14 The Tang tales featured in greater detail a number of remarkable females who were endowed with knightly virtues and supernatural powers. These female knights are obviously dras- tically different from the Confucian archetype of self-effacing, submissive

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women. But, the wuxia imagination is not totally utopian. Although it op- erates according to its own principles, the wuxia world does not exist in a social or ideological vacuum; its irregularity and uniqueness are recognized and veriﬁed through interaction and negotiation with social expectations, such as gender norms. This being the case, the wuxia discourse had to ﬁnd ways to address tensions engendered by its departure from traditional sexual practices. The Tang chivalric tales offer poignant examples.15 Complete denial of the woman warrior’s feminine identity seems to be the easiest way to rationalize her abnormality, as the story of Hongxian (Red Thread) demonstrates.16 Hongxian, a maid in the household of the military governor of Luzhou, has magic powers and can travel hundreds of miles in a night. When Hongxian’s master thanks her for helping him defeat his op- ponent, she informs him that she was a male in her former life. Hongxian’s extraordinary talent and supernatural powers place her outside the conventional feminine sphere of hearth and family. With her quick wit and physical prowess, her agility and unusual mobility, Hongxian stands in sharp contrast to the passive, frail, melancholy beauties of Tang and Song (960–1279) poetry. The character’s proclaimed male origin, however, greatly neutralizes her subversive potential, explaining away her oddity. Masculinized and consequently legitimized, the woman’s outstanding ability, though miraculous, upsets none of the gender distinctions that stabilize the traditional social system. Positioned strategically outside the context of family, the manly woman Hongxian is able to reclaim her (his) masculinity in a woman’s garb. Not all cases can be so conveniently accounted for. When the female knight is placed in a domestic environment, her chivalric pursuits create tensions in her gender identity, jeopardizing her status in traditional society. This often results in her removal from family and motherhood, two institutions that structured, regulated, and gave meaning to women’s existence, as in the tale of Nie Yinniang.17 Kidnapped by a nun at the age of ten, Yinniang receives martial training and is sent on assassination missions. After the girl returns home, Yinniang’s parents lose much of their affection for her when they become aware of her extrafamilial activities. The female character’s mar- ginal status in the story is established by her association with a “dangerous woman,” a nun who locates herself outside gender relationships, forming

sacred alliances with other women by renouncing her ties to family and marriage.18 Yinniang’s unwomanly conduct calls her femininity into ques- tion, and the kidnapping, which initiates the girl into knighthood out of womanhood, makes her reintegration into her family impossible. The death of the character’s father eventually releases her from her family altogether, easing the tension caused by her mutation and allowing her to enter military service. Even though Yinniang is said to have married, neither her husband nor her marriage plays a noticeable role in the story. It seems that the narrator made an effort to provide a normal environment for the female knight only to end up proving her incompatibility with the conventional social structure. Female knight-errantry is in direct conflict with domesticity, the site of traditional femininity. In the tales of both Hongxian and Yinniang, martial chivalry induces doubts and anxieties about the female protagonist’s sexual identity. The tale of Cui Shensi’s wife provides a dramatic example of how threats to gender integrity can be relieved.19 After killing the prefect who caused her father’s death, Cui Shensi’s wife takes the life of her two-year-old son before leaving her husband. Concern for the baby’s future does not seem to be the woman’s motivation; the tale makes it clear that the child’s death enables the mother to make a clean break with her past. The woman, therefore, commits the murder for her own sake. The baby’s murder is ultimately a narrative ploy to resolve an identity crisis precipitated by the female character’s vengeful act. The woman has multiple responsibilities and obligations, as wife, mother, and daughter. In the present case, her filial duty can be fulfilled only through killing a man, which places the woman in a conflicting body politics. Traditional Chinese culture encouraged suicide and disfiguration of the female body as means for a widow to prove her faithfulness to her husband after his death.20 At the same time, Confucianism treated the body as an inheritance from a person’s parents, exhorting people not to damage even their hair or skin so as to show reverence for their elders. Whether Confucius intended it or not, the female body was obviously excluded in this practice. A woman could ravage her own body but never a male’s. Taking a man’s life when justified under the law for whatever reason was a male privilege and consequently a masculine activity: official executioners were invariably men. In premodern China, women who caused the deaths of males suffered more

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severe punishment than men who killed women; the didactic traditional stories, likewise, never failed to mete out retribution to women who dared to harm the male body.21 The female character’s obligation to her father, however, compels Cui’s wife to violate taboo. Killing the man responsible for her father’s death and thereby engaging in an activity only men were licensed to do, the female character takes on a male quality. Before the assassination, the woman’s masculine identity is dormant, allowing her to carry out the normative roles of wife and mother. Once it is activated through violence against the male body, the woman crosses the gender boundary, putting the female body in a dilemma. It cannot be the site of irreconcilable actions: both procreation (of male descendants in particular), the major function assigned the female by the patriarchy, and destruction of (male) life. To maintain gender coherence, the woman has to renounce the essence of femininity, motherhood, thus avoiding a dangerous confusion and impasse. Although female knights- errant in wuxia ﬁction take part in ﬁghting and may consequently cause death, they are rarely mothers.

The Female Warrior-as-Spectacle in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon My discussion in the previous section illustrates that the martial arts imagination has developed its own sets of significations. In contrast to portrayals of women in Hollywood films, the martial arts representations do not invoke the female as an erotic object to gratify men’s sexual desires. A defeminized being vacated from the conventional pattern of domesticity, feminine charm, and sexuality, the woman warrior is neither enchanted nor disenchanted by love.22 When film was introduced into China at the end of the nineteenth century, the wuxia discourse found a new artistic expression. Thanks to its ties with the Peking opera, which regularly features young fighting women (wudan) in acrobatic scenes, the woman warrior has long been active in martial arts cinema.23 True to the martial arts origin, the filmic versions allow the woman warrior to share many masculine qualities: she is as active, mo- bile, physically strong, and capable of chivalry as any male. But it would be wrong to assume that gender boundaries and gender hierarchy are no longer meaningful in this apparently egalitarian discourse. It is hardly the

case that what the male knight can do, the female knight can do, too, to par- ody a communist slogan. In the following reading of the female spectacle in Crouching Tiger, I identify female desire as the site where boundaries are set and maintained and where the female’s surplus energies are harnessed and controlled to ensure male authority. The film’s narrative design associates the woman warrior with a problematic desire, the eruption and containment of which becomes the center of tension and drama. The film starts with Yu Xiulian’s trip to the capital city, where she presents Sir Tie (Sir Te) with a precious sword and stays on as a family guest. The desiring woman, Yu Jiaolong, then plunges the film into frantic action, giv- ing it momentum and pushing it toward a climax. The following series of shots highlights the active desire of the woman. It is a quiet night. A blurry figure runs over the rooftop against the background of a courtyard wall. Cut to a close-up of a person scaling the wall of a house. In quick succession, the person turns around, hangs upside down, opens a window, and slips into a room. The camera follows the person into the room: Yu Jiaolong (we quickly find out her identity) grabs a sword, wraps it in cloth, slings it over her back, and moves toward the door to leave. The series of shots offers “an objective or reference narration” that does not present the character’s point of view, denying the audience a chance to identify with the character: we are at a distance; we do not see what the woman sees and do not experience what she feels.24 The emphasis here is not on what the thief wants; it is on the act of wanting. Within the frame of the shots, the windows and the walls surrounding the house are deliberately positioned to mark the boundaries of two spheres, outside and inside. Entry into and occupation of the inner space require proper authorization, a matter of propriety and legitimacy. The inside/outside dichotomy, so established, limits and guides the spectator’s interpretation: unauthorized presence in the designated space constitutes intrusion. Because the woman’s desire precipitates the intrusion, the unlawfulness of the entry effectively problematizes that desire as im- proper and aggressive. Yu Jiaolong’s incursion into a forbidden area is, in fact, foreshadowed in an earlier part of the film when, much to the surprise of Sir Tie’s housekeeper, she ventures into the official’s study on an earlier visit to the house. Her misplaced self generates misplaced desires—in the study, she sees the sword she later feels compelled to steal. Thus, boundary crossing

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played out against the inside/outside dichotomy becomes a recurring theme that structures the film as a narrative of desire. The object of Jiaolong’s misguided desire is the renowned Sword of Green Destiny, given to Sir Tie by the hero, Li Mubai. A permanent prop in martial arts representations, the sword is a cultural symbol with moral, ideological, and aesthetic appeal even to people beyond the righteous outlaws. The literati, for instance, often incorporate the sword in their poetry to express their ambition to gain office or their disappointment at failing to do so. Its well-known association with knight-errantry allows the sword to stand for the underlying principles of chivalry—individuality, friendship, loyalty, honor, and justice—ascribing certain moral qualities to the individual aligned with the sword, who appreciates the values it signifies. Besides its ideological appeal, the sword suggests a sense of cultural sophistication and elegance, thus becoming a symbol of class; swordsmanship is often aes- theticized and likened to the art of calligraphy, an important part of the cultural tradition of China’s elite. The sword, as a result, seems to enjoy dual status as both wu (physical prowess) and wen (cultivation and grace), the cornerstone of the Chinese conception of manhood.25 Because it appears in close association with male figures—warriors, literati, statesmen, and knights-errant—the sword is a representative image of masculinity and male authority, a perfect motif in the martial arts tradition that centralizes and celebrates masculine vigor and potency. The Sword of Green Destiny extends the idea of masculine power and authority to its corollary, maintenance of law and order. Although the moral power of the wuxia world often resides in its confrontation with the established social order, this is not the case in Crouching Tiger. Yu Xiulian is head of a biaoju, a legitimate insurance company, and both she and Li Mubai enjoy a close friendship with Sir Tie, a high-ranking official in the imperial court.26 Jianghu and the official world are thus integrated in the film, and the Sword of Green Destiny serves as a liaison to make peace and order issues of shared interest. Before Xiulian’s departure for the capital, Li Mubai stops at her house with the famous blade, asking her to deliver it to Sir Tie; it is an indication of his decision to retire from Jianghu. Li wants Sir Tie to keep Green Destiny to prevent it from causing further death among the warriors. By withdrawing the sword from the revenge and personal grudges of Jianghu, Li intends to restore order in the unofficial world.

But the importance of the sword goes beyond individual rivalries: it is pivotal to creating order in private and public realms alike. After receiving the sword from Xiulian, Sir Tie shows it to Governor Yu, who is in charge of public security in the capital. In his conversation with the governor, Sir Tie specifically associates the power of the sword with maintaining social order in the city, advising Governor Yu to enlist the services of members of Jianghu. This juxtaposition makes authority and order issues of universal concern, transcending personal and ideological differences between Jianghu and the official world. A microcosm of gender structure in Chinese society, the rule of the law is a male sphere of operation. Its masculine nature is manifested in the sword’s transferability between two male protagonists, Li Mubai and Sir Tie, the epitomes of moral integrity and order in the two worlds. As soon as Xiulian recovers the sword from Jiaolong in the climactic scene in the cave, she sends it back to Sir Tie, its rightful male owner. Jiaolong’s theft of the sword, in this light, is a usurpation of male power and a grave challenge to both male authority and male propriety. The willful girl is not the only female character who covets the forbidden. Her master, Jade Fox, the arch villain in the film, also goes after what she has no right to see and pursue: the secrets of the Wudang school, one of the major martial arts sects in China. As presented in the film, the school bans female pupils. It seems that even though women are permitted to practice martialarts,measuresaretakentoensuremalesupremacy,sinceperfectionof martial power can be achieved only after learning certain secret principles. In her ambition to improve herself, Jade Fox oversteps the limit set by the patriarchal rules. What is more, she misuses her body to realize her misconceived ambition. Jade Fox offers her sexual services to Jiangnan He (Southern Crane), Li Mubai’s master, in exchange for Wudang secrets. But the Wudang master does not mix business with pleasure. When Jiangnan He refuses to extend to her the privileged male knowledge, Jade Fox turns deadly. She kills him and steals the manuscript. As I have mentioned, China’s traditional ideology defined the female body by its procreative function, making motherhood the ultimate purpose and reward for female sexuality. Female sexuality, illegitimate outside the reproductive role, was subject to constant surveillance and stringent control. Condemned as morally erosive and socially subversive, it was feared and maligned, frequently blamed for

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creating crises of a grand scope. Behind many a dynastic fall was said to have been a legendary woman who oversupplied her man with sex. The list of these devious women is even longer if we add the topplers of smaller family estates, businesses, and political careers (or martial arts careers for that matter).

Imaging Female Desire Jade Fox and Jiaolong, master and disciple, are thus manifestations of an out-of-control female desire that defies gender boundaries. How this desire assumes meaning as images in the film is worth a close look. In his foreword to a study on Hong Kong cinema, John A. Lent notes, “Whether with the swordfighting wuxia, kung fu, or heroic bloodshed genres that they created, Hong Kong filmmakers helped set the style for a cinema that fits the globalization age—full of action with high body counts and minimum dialogue, thus universally translatable.”27 By Hong Kong standards, Crouching Tiger moves slowly, with a low body count and a great deal of dialogue. Lent’s observation nonetheless highlights the importance of nonverbal devices in transnational representations. How, then, is female desire transmitted as a “universally translatable” sign? The setting against which female desire becomes active is highly significant. Both women’s transgressive acts—Jiaolong’s theft of the sword and Jade Fox’s fight with Huang, a police detective tracking her down to bring her to justice—take place at night. The nocturnal backdrop is not simply a narrative necessity to make the events plausible; it is laden with ideological and gender implications. The night is a stock image in the genre of zhiguai (stories of the strange) in China’s classical literary tradition. According to Chinese belief as demonstrated in the zhiguai stories, night is the time when weird things happen, when the ghosts and fox-spirits, more often than not female, come out to prey on the innocent and unsuspecting male, draining his energies and creating chaos. Through their common link to the yin in Chinese cosmology, ghosts, the nocturnal, and women are allied to become one another’s reference.28 Night is thus a sphere of the feminine, a domain of the uncanny, the demonic, and all that is inhuman and irrational. The film defines the desire that asserts itself at night through the female characters as

ominous and enigmatic. The wild desire that disrespects authority and limits is unjustifiable and so relegated to darkness and night; it does not belong to the day, a realm of truth and reason exemplified by the qualities of the yang, the male. The mysteriousness and unspeakability of irregular female desire are reinforced by the masquerade and deception through which it is given expression. The intractable women often appear in disguise: Jiaolong covers herself in dark clothes when stealing the sword; Jade Fox hides her true identity behind the mask of a benign governess. Besides the obvious point that disguise indicates deceit and duplicity, the camouflage is unavoidable because the unruly desire, baffling and unsettling in its ambiguity and un- predictability, is an anomaly and, as a result, inexpressible. Neither feminine nor legitimately masculine, it floats in an alien space neither sex can claim or endorse. The unlawful ambition cannot assume a familiar, comprehensible appearance because there are no existing signs in the conventional semiotic system to let it express itself. It can be presented only through disguise or through a black outfit that becomes meaningful precisely because it lacks recognizable meanings. The sharp contrast between the two images of Jiaolong—a thief in a dark suit who betrays no feminine features and a fragile young lady in a colorful bridal gown—illustrates the point. Fulfilling her social obligation as a bride, the girl with her femininity on full display via a splendid wedding dress is understandable, definable, and presentable. In contrast, the female pos- sessed by a rampant desire to challenge male authority is indescribable and incommunicable: she assumes form through a dark, nondescript garment. The feminine attire that signals the female’s status as a beautiful object of male fantasy cannot be used to express anything to the contrary. In addition, the female body so encoded is not allowed to simultaneously be the bearer of a monstrous spirit that refuses to honor boundaries. It must be covered up in black clothes so that the connection between the gendered body and questionable desire can be denied. When Jiaolong runs away from her marriage carrying the sword, she disguises herself as a man, leaving behind the wedding dress, the sign of her femininity. Her possession of the sword, an icon of masculinity, now enables her ambition to be externalized through a body image that imitates that of a male.

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Transgressive female desire lurks in a borderland at the edge of regularity and normality. The marginality of excessive desire is further confirmed in its ties with those who exist both geographically and ideologically on the peripheries of society and the dominant culture. After murdering Jiangnan He, Jade Fox hides in the frontier to avoid punishment, awaiting her chance for a comeback. Jiaolong’s disobedience of her mother’s order not to look out the window of the carriage they are riding in during a robbery of their convoy results in her illicit relationship with Xiaohu (Lo), the leader of a gang of bandits in the desert. Fearless and independent but capable of love and tender emotions, Xiaohu is a sympathetic figure. He nonetheless represents the primitive and untamed, attributes shared by the unbridled female. The wild woman’s dishonorable use of dubious weapons is further evidence of her problematic nature. Considered unethical in martial arts, the adoption of hidden weapons (anqi) and poison is often taken to be a sign of moral depravity and villainy. Thwarted in her ambition to rule Jianghu, Jade Fox kills Li Mubai with poisonous darts when he tries to protect Jiaolong. Unintelligible and elusive, illegitimate female desire is disorderly and violent both in its structural function in the film and in its ideological char- acteristics. Crouching Tiger’s very first shot establishes for the audience a state of harmony, introducing us to Xiulian’s house: in the background are green mountains, and in the foreground a shimmering pond. The scene is a perfect image of a traditional landscape painting (shanshui hua), a picture of balance and serenity. This initial vision of tranquility and prosperity is soon echoed by a shot of the bustling but orderly streets in the capital city. Like the arche- typal female curiosity that releases a swarm of troubles from Pandora’s box, the misplaced female desire in Crouching Tiger is the subversive origin of chaos and death. Jiaolong not only throws Sir Tie’s house into disarray with her burglary, she also creates havoc in the Jianghu world. For her part, Jade Fox is responsible for all the deaths in the film—those of Detective Huang, his wife, and the hero, Li Mubai. The presence of a police detective to rep- resent the law shifts a private vendetta, a common motif in wuxia literature, into the public arena, thus characterizing the uninhibited females as a public threat, a source of universal anarchy and destruction. The devastation also spreads to the most sacred bond in the Jianghu world, that between master and disciple. The mutual betrayal by the women stands in harsh contrast

to the devotion between the men: whereas Li Mubai’s last mission before retiring from Jianghu is to avenge his master’s death, Jiaolong deceives her master and Jade Fox attempts to kill her disciple.

“Taming the Shrew” In the above analysis, I have focused on Jade Fox and Jiaolong as the em- bodiments of a dangerous and destructive female desire. But a discussion of women in the film would not be complete without examining Yu Xiulian’s role in the narrative design. A model of self-censorship, sacrifice, and pru- dence, Xiulian stands for moderation and reason, a more mature image of the female warrior. Although deeply in love with Li Mubai, she suppresses her desire to honor the memory of her fiancé and the brotherhood between him and Li. She also tries to convince Jiaolong to conform to social expectations and accept the marriage arranged by her parents (though she later changes her mind and helps the girl reunite with her lover, Xiaohu). Thus Xiulian represents an appropriate, discreet female desire that knows its limitations and supports the dominant power structure. In her reading of the film, Woei Lien Chong identifies Xiulian with the element earth, noting that her feet always touch the rooftops or the ground in the fight scenes, unlike Li Mubai and Jiaolong. Chong concludes that in her submission to social rules, Xiulian “is too heavy, too earthbound to fly through the air,” whereas Jiaolong and Li enjoy certain spiritual freedom.29 More significant, Xiulian plays a crucial role in taming the wild desire represented by Jiaolong, bringing the younger woman under control. The fights between the two female warriors are battles between reason and ir- rationality, discipline and caprice. Xiulian’s involvement with the Sword of Green Destiny is of strategic importance in defining the nature of unorthodox female ambition. If Jiaolong is punished for laying her hands on the sword, what makes Xiulian’s contact with it justifiable and acceptable? Xi- ulian functions as a courier to ensure the sword’s safe transference between its male owners, Li Mubai and Sir Tie. She respects boundaries and male privilege: although she appears in many combat scenes, she never once uses the famous sword. At the first meeting of the two women, in Sir Tie’s study, Jiaolong asks Xiulian if she uses a sword. Xiulian informs the girl that she

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prefers the double sword, acknowledging that Green Destiny is particularly suitable for Li Mubai’s skill. After finally getting it back from Jiaolong in the cave, she immediately returns the sword to Sir Tie. The real issue here is not so much the sword as a specific form of martial weapon(womenareallowedtouseitinmanywuxiastories);theessenceofthe transgressions committed by Jiaolong and Jade Fox lies in their disregard for male authorization. When Li Mubai realizes Jiaolong’s potential, he offers to teach her. Xiulian questions his decision, reminding him of the Wudang school’s prohibition against women. Li tells her he hopes to persuade the Wudang masters to accept the girl. Sure enough, Jiaolong eventually arrives at Wudang mountain and, with Li’s endorsement, is allowed to stay in the temple there. Obviously, there is room for maneuver: boundaries can be reset and rules reformulated—as long as proper (male) authority remains unchallenged. As Jack Nicholson’s character in the film A Few Good Men, a navy commander in Guantanamo Bay, says to Tom Cruise’s character when he demands a copy of the transfer order for a murdered marine: “You just have to ask nicely.” Female desire must be authorized and legitimized. Without male approval, women’s initiatives spell trouble and disaster; yet blessed by male guidance and intervention, female ambition can be salvaged and the women who show such ambition can be rescued. Death, paradoxically, can be the final act of salvation, a form of real deliv- erance. Jiaolong throws herself over a cliff at the end of the film. Her death seems to have little to do with her love for Xiaohu. Her relationship with the rebellious warrior may have motivated Jiaolong to renounce her arranged marriage, but the girl did not run away to join Xiaohu. When the young couple finally have a chance to realize their love for each other thanks to the older warriors’ help, Jiaolong chooses to die. We assume that by sacri- ficing herself she hopes to fulfill a wish—to bring Li Mubai back. Death is the “location for all the impossible signs”—woman’s excessive desire and the female body gone wild.30 Having witnessed its deadly consequences, Jiaolong gives up her youthful ambition. The suicide is a masochistic act of repentance. The female body is punished for initiating and harboring the unauthorized desire that causes the demise of the male hero. Its voluntary destruction offers the female body a chance at redemption and sublimation; the wish to revive the male body by eliminating the female body pays tribute

to male authority, turning the penitent female warrior into an “amenable spectacle.”31 Moreover, the disembodiment ﬁnally separates the problematic desire from the body, rehabilitating it. Disowned, the unruly desire is deprived of an agent and is safely exiled and disempowered. Recouping male authority by containing runaway female desire thus functions as a narrative/ideological axis around which the ﬁlm constructs a cautionary tale against gender transgression and border crossing.

The Monstrous Body My analyses of the chivalric tales and Crouching Tiger prove that in spite of the genre’s reconfiguration of conventional boundaries, the wuxia discourse is not gender blind. In more subtle ways, the binary classification continues to underlie some martial representations and their creations of structured chaos. To further probe the gender consciousness of the martial arts vision, I turn to a more radical image in the wuxia cinema: the gender-bending characters. The transgression embodied by these characters is so extreme that it apparently incapacitates the traditional male-female dualism, the normative intersect of cultural meanings. The conjoined twins in the movie Baifa monü zhuan (The Bride with White Hair, 1993) and the character Asia the Invincible in Dongfang Bubai fengyun zai qi (The East Is Red, 1993), who castrates himself in a mad pursuit of power, are notable figures in a string of androgynous characters in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The emergence of such characters is seen by critics as a result of Hong Kong’s decriminalization of homosexuality and a reflection of the society’s awareness of the growing power of women in public affairs; the castration of the character Asia the Invincible is also taken to be an allegory of Hong Kong’s worries about its identity after unification with the mainland (which took place in 1997).32 I center here on the gender implications of this cinematic ploy, as a way of measuring the anxieties and concerns about identity induced by its history and the social changes that Hong Kong was going through. I am interested in uncovering what is invested in the monstrous body that defies gender categories. By looking into the construction of deviancy, I examine how ideology is combined with physiology, ultimately confirming the importance of gendering by, paradoxically, subverting it.

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Baifamonüzhuan,starringBrigitteLinChing-hsiaandLeslieCheungand directed by Ronny Yu, dramatizes the conflict between good and evil, love and trust. Central to the stormy relationship between the Wolf Girl (Brigitte Lin), a woman warrior, and Zhuo Yihang (Leslie Cheung), a swordsman, are the conjoined twins, who are intent on using the woman warrior to destroy the Eight Clans in the Central Plain. Joined at the back, the twins’ peculiar body makes their sexual identity fluid and indeterminable. Although they are shown as a male and a female, because they are inseparable neither is independent, and their unnatural union becomes a significant trope in the movie. For example, in a cave scene where the twins’ underlings are chanting and jumping around in an ominous ritual, a medium shot isolates for us a dancing figure wearing a bizarre mask. Through a rapid series of shots, the masked figure—naked—changes from male to female in dizzying alternation. We are shocked and confused, the constant shifts frustrating our need and expectation for fixed, solid gender images. Indications of elusive identity, the mask and the instant transformation symbolize the twins and their transsexual nature. Because of their physiological condition, the twins are predestined to be a unitary whole. Later in the film when the male twin is tormented by his lust for the Wolf Girl, the female twin reminds him that because of his twisted body, nobody would desire him. A high-angle long shot at this point establishes for us two bodies covered by a blanket. An invisible hand then pulls away the blanket, and the camera zooms in to reveal two nude figures attached to one another at the back. The absurd body flaunts its grotesqueness: it is both male and female. Asia the Invincible (again played by Brigitte Lin) in Dongfang Bubai fengyun zai qi, the third installment in the Swordsman series, is another example of gender oddity. In his ambition to dominate China and the world, Asia, the male chief of the Sun-Moon sect of the Miao tribe, castrates himself in order to master the power contained in the Sacred Scroll. After faking his death (so it seems) in the previous installment, Asia returns to Jianghu in Dongfang Bubai fengyun zai qi and goes on a rampage to destroy the cults led by his impersonators, who try to capitalize on his reputation as a supreme warrior. Asia’s sexual identity after the castration remains an open issue. In his reading of the Swordsman series, Stephen Teo sees the mutilated Asia as “an androgyny on her way to a full sex change,” treating the character as a

demonstration of “the female as a dangerous, elusive, creature.”33 There is evidence to support this interpretation. As Teo notes, Asia’s lethal weapon— needles and threads—is unmistakably feminine; other characters in the movie, too, believe that Asia is no longer a man. There is, however, also evidence to the contrary. Despite alternating between a male and a female appearance, Asia retains his claim on his former concubine, Snow, and wants her back; Snow, likewise, maintains her love for and loyalty to her partner. In addition, the character’s male identity is sustained at a linguistic level: the English subtitles opt to refer to the protagonist in the masculine form. Thus, Asia’s identity eludes and befuddles us, as it does the warriors in Jianghu.I would argue that the character’s gender ambiguity is exactly where the body politics is deployed. The castration liberates the character from a closed gender system, turning Asia into a free signifier who can manipulate the codes and mutate as she or he chooses. Neither male nor female, consequently re- strained by neither sex, Asia stakes a claim on an unthinkable space between the sexes. In her study of cross-dressing in cinema, Annette Kuhn argues that “per- haps the pleasure of the most popular films of sexual disguise lie[s] in their capacity to offer, at least momentarily, a vision of fluidity of gender options; to provide a glimpse of ‘a world outside the order normally seen or thought about.’”34 The difference between the Hollywood model Kuhn examines and the cases I discuss here is, of course, that the abnormality of the twins and Asia is existential and therefore much more fundamental. It resides in the deformed body and not in the clothes that can be put on or taken off without altering the entity that is temporarily disguised in a carnivalesque moment. Permanent and irreversible, the aberrations in the Hong Kong movies are at a point of no return. Neither the twins nor Asia can recover normal bodies. Nonetheless, Kuhn raises a pertinent issue: What can we glimpse in that mysterious space between the sites inscribed as male and female? Indeed, what is piled onto the curious body that so blatantly upsets gender stability? In the Hong Kong movies, the nonstandard space promises an extreme power, unavailable to the gendered being because the power has its origin outside the conventional system. The conjoined twins and Asia are super- human in their destructive potency as a result of their unique physiques.

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The twins can change form and become invisible; they are indomitable until they are cut apart by the swordsman Zhuo Yihang in the film’s climax. And Asia becomes undefeatable after his self-mutilation. But the abnormal body breeds evil, generating abnormal forces that are deadly in intent and consequence. The twins bring into their cult the Wolf Girl, an orphan who grew up in the wild with the wolves; they dehumanize her by training her as a killing machine to take revenge on their enemies. Twenty years earlier, the Eight Clans expelled the twins from the Central Plain because of their obsession with an evil cult. Although the Eight Clans spared their lives, the twins repay them with hate and spite, slaughtering the villagers. The demonic body submits to no reason or compassion. Asia shares with the twins a sadistic pleasure in killing. After his/her res- urrection, the character plunges into merciless destruction of members of his/her former sect because they refused to accept the death of their idol. When the worshippers proclaim their loyalty “with all their hearts,” an en- raged Asia grants their wish and, thanks to special effects, punches their hearts out of their bodies. It would be hard to locate Asia on any familiar moral axis. The character is not bound by Jianghu ethics, such as loyalty and patriotism, two codes often eulogized in Hong Kong martial arts cinema. In the movie, China and the foreign powers seem to be the antagonists. The Japanese and the Spaniards who come to China with questionable motives appear to be a threat to the natives. But if the name Asia the Invincible suggests certain nationalistic sentiments in this conceptual scheme, the character’s behavior thwarts our expectations. In an effort to beat the Ming imperial army that tries to stop him/her, the character allies with the Japan- ese mercenaries and wreaks havoc on the Chinese troops. Asia eventually adopts the name Dong Xi Fang Bubai (East and West Invincible), a moniker devoid of any nationalist implications. Moral deficiencies and constitutional anomalies are conflated in these martial arts films; the gender-bending imagination taps into sexual ambiguities for novel representations. Martial power and violence, familiar ingredients of the wuxia cinema, become intertwined with a deviant body that honors no gender principles, evading the most central division in human society. As Kuhn observes, “Gender is what crucially defines us, so that an ungendered subject cannot, in this view, be human. The human being, in other words, is

a gendered subject.”35 The middle ground between the sexes is therefore the locus of the inhuman. The grotesque body, portrayed as inherently diabolic, becomes a symbolic marker of the ultimate other, the other to humanity, which serves as a dumping ground for all our unwanted impulses—extreme vengeance, malice, cruelty, inhibited desires, and disregard for human life and moral values. Savage and barbarous, the biologically different is made to stand for all that civilization wishes to purge from the human race. But the construction of abnormality presupposes normalcy. Thus, implicit in the topography of deviancy is a confirmation of gender regularity and its cen- trality in a comprehensible, orderly human society. The vision that reads evil into a gender vacuum is ultimately expressing anxiety over the explosion of gender distinctions. For the movies illustrate that to step completely out of sexual boundaries is to step outside rationality and that departure from gendering leads to the abandonment of humanity. My analyses of Crouching Tiger and the Hong Kong movies above show that a sort of duplicity informs the gender imagination in the martial arts discourse.Ontheonehand,itsgenericconventionsarepredicatedonthesub- versions of regular sexual codes, thereby providing a platform for unorthodox representations of women in a fantasized wuxia world. On the other hand, the inscriptions of order, normalcy, and hierarchy in Jianghu reaffirm the normative gender system, revealing nervousness and anxiety about radical transgressions. As exemplified in Crouching Tiger and the Hong Kong films, picturesque imagery and furious actions release subversive pleasures only to reclaim them under the authority of conventional binarism. The unruly energy of the young female warrior in Crouching Tiger transpires into humility and remorse, and the grotesque body that resists sexual boundaries in Hong Kong cinema warns of the end of civilization. That the social anxiety over Hong Kong as a hybridity with problematic ties to both its past and future should express itself in an apocalyptic fiction against sexual ambiguities via the martial arts discourse attests to the predominance of gender in how we organize and produce meanings. It is also evidence that, in spite of the subversive tendency, the duplicity in its gender imagination could turn the martial arts genre into a seemingly unlikely partner in the preservation of established gendered vision.

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The Cross-Cultural Spectator I noted at the beginning of my article that the growing popularity of the martial arts genre in global circulation has made explorations of its gender imaginations more compelling. By way of concluding, I would like to briefly consider the reception of transcultural productions, using the case of Crouch- ing Tiger to reflect on the complexities of cross-cultural spectatorship. The responses the movie invokes in different Chinese communities demonstrate, at an extradiegetic level, the challenges presented by border crossing. As shown in the various approaches to spectatorship since the 1980s, the spectators’ position is as heterogeneous and fluid as that of the spectacle. Instead of being confined to a constricting and totalizing psychoanalytic and semiotic model, the spectator is recognized as a social and historical subject informed with a range of cultural knowledge and ideological leanings.36 Transnational cinema has added a new dimension, the global/local interface, to an already intricate issue.37 In contrast to its success in the West, Crouching Tiger has not fared well in China. Despite Hong Kong’s prominence in the film—two of its best- known stars (Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh) and the highly renowned action director Yuen Woo-Ping are from Hong Kong, and three of the film’s ten Oscar nominations have gone to Hong Kong residents—Crouching Tiger has made barely $2 million in the homeland of martial arts cinema.38 The responses from Hong Kong critics were on the whole positive and congratulatory;HongKongfilmgoers,however,foundthemovieboringand slow.39 Law Kar, a historian at the Hong Kong Film Archive, characterizes Crouching Tiger as a challenge to local tastes, noting that the first fight does not break out for fifteen minutes.40 The airborne fights, Stephen Sze, chairman of the Hong Kong Film Critics’ Association, points out, “might look exotic to foreign audiences but it has been done before, and better, in other Hong Kong films.”41 The viewers in Hong Kong are indeed hard to please. If they complained about the film’s lack of originality, they also thought the directors overplayed certain conventions. The bamboo-forest scene, which created jaw-dropping excitement at the Cannes International Film Festival, “provoked giggles” in Hong Kong and Shanghai, according to a New York Times review.42 “For us, that scene was exaggerated,” opines

Sze. “It became almost ridiculous. Young people want to see action films that are more realistic.”43 It seems that by the turn of the twenty-first century, HongKongviewerswerelessenthralledbygravity-defyingstunts,afamiliar practice in the wuxia cinema. They are now more attracted by the derring- do of Jackie Chan action comedies, police thrillers set in the contemporary world, and movies that deal with current issues in Hong Kong, a city of uncertain future and status. Thus, changes in both consumer tastes and the zeitgeist affected the popularity of Crouching Tiger in Hong Kong. Mainland audiences have likewise objected to the movie on the grounds of its lack of realism. Not at all impressed by the characters’ martial feats, one Beijing viewer remarked, “Put me on wires, I could fly around too.”44 In China, unlike Hong Kong, the martial arts (wushu) are not just a cinematic draw but a national sport. Shaolin si (The Shaolin Temple) (1979), the first martial arts movie made in the mainland after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), stars national wushu champion Jet Li. Although it was eventually completed by a Hong Kong director, the film is a showcase of China’s best martial arts athletes in armed and bare-handed combat, largely free of wires and special effects. After Shaolin si was released, hundreds of youngsters showed up in Songshan, the setting of the movie, asking to be trained in the moves the actors used. This even prompted government agencies to issue statements reminding people that it was unnecessary to learn self-defense in the safe environment of the People’s Republic.45 The mainland notion of what counts as real in the martial arts does not arise out of ignorance of the images Hong Kong has to offer. Since the 1980s, Hong Kong films have entered China through both official channels and piracy. But especially in the case of martial arts films, their influence among mainstream audiences has been limited. The action films available in pirated videos and disks are usually second- or third-rate productions that attract mainly the lower classes.46 The attitude of the mainland populace toward Hong Kong is ambivalent, and vice versa. The Chinese admire Hong Kong’s material prosperity but not so much its cultural achievements, despite the fact that Hong Kong popular culture has had a great following among mainland young people. Although mainland viewers have been exposed to Hong Kong action styles, they tend to consider the special effects and stunts aided by wires prevalent in the swordplay subgenre as gimmicks of

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commercial cinema rather than as true representations of the martial arts, whereas the kung fu films that emphasize actual physical skills have more appeal. Chinese viewers, intellectuals in particular, may watch Hong Kong films for entertainment, but they do not necessarily hold them in high esteem as authentic representations of the national culture. Besides the mainland’s sense of its cultural superiority and authority on the definition of Chineseness, the marginalization of the martial arts genre has other profound historical and ideological sources. Because of its destructive tendency, martial arts fiction was suppressed even in premodern China. It was prohibited in the Ming and Qing periods, along with other types of literature branded pornographic or fantastic.47 In the twentieth century, this narrative tradition has been consistently ignored or disparaged in the modern project of nation building. Under the hegemony of the two meta- narratives of the nation—the May Fourth movement of enlightenment and the communist discourse of socialist construction—martial arts as ideological and aesthetic expressions were condemned as remnants of the old feudal culture detrimental to the rise of a modern nation. In the May Fourth revolution, martial arts fiction as well as the so-called mandarin duck and butterfly sentimental melodrama were dismissed as popular literature that catered to the lower classes. For fear of their bad influence on youth, the nationalist government banned martial arts movies in the 1930s; during the war against Japan (1937–45), the film industry favored patriotic films with anti-Japanese themes.48 While wuxia fiction flourished in Hong Kong and Taiwan after the 1950s, it completely disappeared during communist rule in the mainland, when revolution and class struggle, presented in the realist mode, became the only legitimate subject matter for literary creation. The martial arts genre was not the only one to suffer. Under the stringent official policy, any genre that required flights of nonrealist fancy, such as supernatural tales, ghost stories, and science fiction, had little room to develop in the mainland after 1949. Even in the 1990s, when the distinction between high and low art was greatly blurred because of the influx of popular culture from outside the mainland and the commercialization of the cultural industry within, wuxia fiction remained low in the literary hierarchy.49

The mainland sensitivity to China’s image in world cinema further com- plicates the reception of transnational productions. Crouching Tiger was by no means the first film that did well overseas but failed at home. Although Chinese critics welcomed international recognition of the new Chinese cinema that came into being in the post-Mao era in the 1980s, they were resistant to what they interpreted as allegories of the nation in films made by fifth- generation directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. Chinese critics at home and abroad accused the directors of spotlighting China’s backward- ness, thus willingly participating in the orientalist gaze. They questioned the authenticity of the national image these directors created on the international screen using foreign capital. Detractors of Zhang Yimou’s widely acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern, for example, argued that the visual attrac- tions he added—the rituals of lanterns and foot massage—eroticized and exoticized China for the enjoyment of foreign audiences.50 Yet other filmmakers followed Zhang’s example to woo Western attention. As Sheldon Lu states, Zhang’s films are part of the cultural self-reflection that Chinese intellectuals have been engaged in since the mid-1980s.51 Such introspection sometimes yielded scathing criticism of the nation and its psyche but was lauded by critics as a significant step toward understanding the national tradition and its role in modernization. But the entrance of the nation into global circulation introduced a new dynamic. The presence of a foreign audience tends to induce suspicion about the construction of Chineseness as well as anxiety over its authenticity.52 Although Chinese critics would not approach Crouching Tiger as they would a film by a mainland director, the priority given to nation building, intellectual dispositions about popular culture, and cautions about the image of the nation in coproductions all seemed to have colored the rather muted reception of the film in the mainland. In an age of globalization dominated by Western technologies and econo- mies, cultural imperialism constitutes a clear and present danger. It would, indeed, be unfortunate if globalization were to lead to either homogeniza- tion after the Western model or the othering of indigenous cultures from the Western perspective, for either movement would privilege Western authority. Yet the quest for nationhood and the vigilance over its representation in a transnational setting are not the only paradigm in which ethnic experience can be voiced and examined. Dimensions of a native culture that do not fit

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neatly into the discourse of a nation, however it is inscribed in a particular moment, also deserve attention. My discussion of certain aspects of the gender imaginations of the martial arts tradition is both an effort to explore the genre as a signiﬁcant cultural practice and a strategy to draw attention to the multifaceted nature of transnational representations. Cultural translations may convey prejudice and bias as well as the excitement of local culture.

Notes

Although I use pinyin in this article, names of directors and actors familiar to Hong Kong viewers appear in their habitual spellings. I have included in parentheses the names of characters in Crouching Tiger as they are rendered in the film’s English subtitles. I would like to thank my colleague Juliette Apkarian and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and insightful commentary, which helped me improve my argument. 1 Naysayers sometimes faced harsh backlashes. See, for example, Charlotte Raven, “Crashing Bore, Wooden Drama,” Guardian, January 16, 2001, film.guardian.co.uk/features/ featurepages/0,4120,422986,00.html, and the response from Anna Chen, “Crouching Tiger, NotVeryWellHiddenPrejudices,”Guardian,January19,2001,film.guardian.co.uk/features/ featurepages/0,3604,424523,00.html. Raven’s review generated so much outrage that Ian Katz, the Guardian editor in charge of the column in which the review appeared, published an open letter, addressing it, “Dear (angry) reader.” A copy of the letter can be viewed at www.dimsum.co.uk/article.php?sid=173 (accessed September 9, 2003). 2 See Grace Leung and Joseph Chen, “The Hong Kong Cinema and Its Overseas Market: A Historical Review, 1950–1995,” in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, ed. Law Kar and Stephen Teo (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997); David Bordwell, “Once upon a Time in the West; Enough to Make a Strong Man Weep: John Woo,” in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 82–114. For discussions of Hollywood’s absorption of Hong Kong action cinema, see also Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 122–26. Yvonne Tasker attributes the appearance of the fighting heroine in black action films to American companies’ attempts to capitalize on the success of Hong Kong action movies with black audiences. The critic also points out that the influence of Hong Kong martial arts films was behind the action heroine in Hollywood films in the 1970s and the 1980s. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 21–26, and the rest of the chapter. 3 On the Western reception of Hong Kong martial arts movies, see David Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema’s First American Reception,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2000), 19–43. According to Fu and Desser, the art-house success of King Hu’s Touch of Zen (1975) eventually led to a renaissance of martial arts films overseas in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fu and Desser, introduction to The Cinema of Hong Kong, 3–4. See also Bordwell, “Once upon a Time in the West,” in Planet Hong Kong, 82–97. In his analysis of Hong Kong action craft, Bordwell suggests that Hollywood has much to learn from Hong Kong artistry in filming and editing; Bordwell, “Motion Emotion: The Art of the Action Movie; Three Martial Masters: Zhang Che, Lau Kar-Leung, King Hu,” in Planet Hong Kong, 199–260. See also Bordwell’s “Aesthetics in Action: Kung fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 73–93. 4 Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, 137–38. 5 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 177–78. 6 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11. 7 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 123. 8 Bad Object-Choices, How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay, 1991); bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996); “The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race?” special issue, Screen 29, no. 4 (1988). 9 Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9–27. 10 See, for example, Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997). 11 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was adapted from volume four of the He-Tie (crane-iron) pentalogy, a novel of the same title, by Wang Dulu (1909–77). Stephen Teo, for example, sees both the central role of women in the film and the fight scenes in the inn and the bamboo forest as Lee’s tribute to King Hu, the master of Hong Kong martial arts cinema. Teo, “Love and Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance,” www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/ crouching.html (accessed June 13, 2001). 12 In his study of the warrior figure in Chinese literature, James Liu identifies the knightly virtues as altruism, justice, individual freedom, personal loyalty, courage, truthfulness and mutual faith, honor and fame, generosity and contempt for wealth. Liu, The Chinese Knight- Errant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 7. 13 Verina Glaessner identifies vengeance as a hallmark of the genre. Glaessner, Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance (London: Lorrimer, 1974). 14 Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 85. Liu provides a translation of the story “The Maiden of Yue” on the same page. 15 The development of a more elaborate narrative style in the Tang period gave writers more space to flesh out the female knights than the previous anecdotal model had provided. But

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the more vivid the woman’s chivalrous deeds, the more pronounced the conflict between her behavior and social norms, and the greater the urge to explain the disparities and the subversive positions. After wuxia fiction became a full-fledged genre in the late Qing (1644– 1911), when the discourse of women’s emancipation began to take shape, female knights tended to take on familiar patterns and types that required less justification. Thus there is a higher degree of self-consciousness in the depiction of the female in earlier chivalric tales than in later texts. 16 “Hung-hsien chuan” (“The Story of Hongxian”), in E. D. Edwards, Chinese Prose Literature of the Tang Period (AD 618–906), vol. 2, (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1938), 123–27. 17 “Yinniang the Swords Woman,” in Chi-chen Wang, trans., Traditional Chinese Tales (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 98–103. 18 Victoria Cass, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 19 “Ts’ui Shen-ssu’s Wife,” in Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 96–97. 20 Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), compiled by the scholar Liu Xiang (77–76 BC) in the early Han period (206 BC–AD 9), includes life stories of many women in antiquity who mutilated their bodies in the name of chastity. Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan (Taipei: Sibu Beiyao, 1966). Since the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the imperial government has encouraged female self-destruction by constructing monumental arches honoring chaste widows and offering financial incentives to their families. 21 Under imperial law, a woman’s relationship to her husband was that of a junior to a senior. False accusation of the husband was punishable by death in the Ming period (1368–1644). In Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing times, if a husband killed his wife by accident, it was not considered a crime; but if the husband was the victim of an accident for which his wife could be blamed, the woman would inevitably be sentenced to death. See Ch’ü T’ung-Tsu, Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 102–10. 22 The male knight undergoes a similar suppression of his sexuality. He is not interested in feminine beauty and is thus safe from its dangerous allure. The denial of the male knight’s sexuality, however, augments his masculinity, whereas the loss in the woman invariably leads to the destruction of her femininity. Obviously, masculinity is more elastic in that it can challenge all sorts of conventions, including male sexuality, without putting itself in danger. In the Qing period, romance was introduced into wuxia fiction, but courtship does not follow the traditional trajectory: matrimonial bliss and harmony often come after a hearty fight, a fierce competition in martial skills. 23 For discussions of female martial arts stars, see, for example, Bey Logan, “Fighting Females: The Far East’s Favorite Females of Fury,” in Hong Kong Action Cinema (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1996), 153–71; Glaessner, “Lady Kung Fu: Angela Mao,” in Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance, 73–82.

24 The objective narration is different from the point-of-view shot in that in the point-of-view shot the camera assumes the position of a character to show us what that character sees. See Edward Branigan, “The Point-of-View Shot,” in Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (New York: Mouton, 1984), 103–21. 25 In a newly published study, Kam Louie identiﬁes the dyad wen-wu (cultural attainment- martial valor) as the axis in the Chinese conceptualization of masculinity. Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In the book’s jacket illustration—a portrait of Confucius by the artist Wu Daozi (c. 750)—the ancient sage, the ultimate representative of wen, has a sword tucked under his arm. 26 James Liu suggests that the rise of the biaoju profession, which provided armed escorts to protect travelers and merchant caravans against highway robbery, may have been responsible for the decline of knight-errantry in the Qing period. The practice of biaoju signiﬁcantly changed the knight-errant’s relationship to law and order, turning the warriors into “guardians of the law instead of law-breakers.” Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 53. 27 John A. Lent, foreword to City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover (London: Verso, 1999), ix. 28 Cass, Dangerous Women, 94–97; see also Judith T. Zeitlin, “Embodying the Disembodied: Representations of Ghosts and the Feminine,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 242–63. 29 Woei Lien Chong, “Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fruit Chan’s Little Che- ung: Two Chinese Highlights at the 2001 International Rotterdam Film Festival,” China Information 15 (2001): 171. 30 Claire Johnston, “Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies,” in Jacques Tourneur, ed. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1975), 40. 31 Paul Sutton, “La Femme Nikita: Violent Woman or Amenable Spectacle?” in Film Studies: Women in Contemporary World Cinema, ed. Alexandra Heidi Karriker (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 91–100. 32 Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 201–2. Teo suggests that society’s changing attitudes toward women and homosexuals, female impersonation in the Chinese theatrical tradition, and the stereotyping of eunuchs all played a part in Hong Kong’s fascination with the gender-bending motif in the 1990s. See also Bhaskar Sarkar, “Hong Kong Hysteria: Martial Arts Takes from a Mutating World,” in Yau, At Full Speed, 169–70. 33 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, 200–201. 34 Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 50. 35 Ibid., 52. 36 For discussions of the nature of the spectator, see “The Spectatrix,” ed. Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane, special issue, Camera Obscura, nos. 20/21 (1989). See also Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1994), 193–209.

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37 For an anthology on various aspects of the global/local interactions in cross-cultural produc- tionsandconsumptions,seeGlobal/Local:CulturalProductionandtheTransnationalImaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 38 Mark Landler, “Lee’s Tiger, Celebrated Everywhere but at Home,” New York Times, February 27, 2001. According to Landler, this figure puts Crouching Tiger way behind the Hollywood import Mission Impossible 2 and a local comedy, Needing You, by Johnny To. 39 See the comments on filmcritics.org.hk/crouchingtiger/review.html (accessed August 12, 2003). 40 Landler, “Lee’s Tiger, Celebrated Everywhere but at Home.” 41 “HK Underwhelmed by Tiger Phenomenon,” news.Ichinastar.com/news.shtml?1=english& a=express&p=1048022 (accessed August 12, 2003). Other viewers shared this opinion. See reviews by Landler and Steve Rose. “The film is so slow, it’s like grandma telling stories.” Steve Rose, Guardian, February 13, 2001, film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/ 0,4120,437326,00.html (accessed April 22, 2005). 42 Landler, “Lee’s Tiger, Celebrated Everywhere but at Home.” 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema, 177. 46 Hu Ke, “The Influence of Hong Kong Cinema on Mainland China (1980–1996),” in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, 171–78. 47 An Pingqiu and Zhang Peiheng, Zhongguo jingshu daguan (An Overview of Banned Books in China) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 1990); Liu Damu, “From Chivalric Fiction to Martial Arts Film,” in A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945–1980) (Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1981), 47–62. 48 Yu Mo-wan, “Swords, Chivalry and Palm Power: A Brief Survey of the Cantonese Martial Arts Cinema, 1938–1970,” in A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945–1980), 99. 49 When Beijing University granted Jin Yong, one of the most prominent writers of the genre, an honorary professorship in 1994, it created a great deal of commotion in the scholarly community. For a discussion on the debate over popular fiction in the May Fourth period, see Chen Pingyuan, “Literature High and Low: ‘Popular Fiction’ in Twentieth-CenturyChina,” in The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 113–33. 50 For discussions of the reception of transnational cinema in mainland China and Zhang Yi- mou’s films, see, for example, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital: The Films of Zhang Yimou,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Iden- tity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 105–36; Tonglin Lu, “The Zhang Yimou Model,” chap. 5 in Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

51 Lu, “National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital,” 107–13. 52 See Rey Chow’s critique of cross-cultural interpretative politics in the criticism of Zhang Yi- mou in her book Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), chap. 4, esp. 152–72. See also Yingjin Zhang’s discussion of transnational cultural politics in contemporary Chinese cinema in “Chi- nese Cinema and Transmational Politics: Rethinking Film Festivals, Film Productions, and Film Studies,” in Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconﬁgurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 15–41.

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