Under “Western Eyes”: the Personal Odyssey of Huang Fei-Hong in Once Upon a Time in China by Tony Williams

Under “Western Eyes”: The Personal Odyssey of Huang Fei-Hong in Once upon a Time in China by Tony Williams Rather than being read in exclusively postmodernist terms, Tsui Hark’s series Once upon a Time in China may be understood as a new version of a Hong Kong cin- ematic discourse involving historical “interflow.” It deals with dispersion, China’s relationship to the outside world, and strategic forms of reintegration designed to strengthen national identity. In Sammo Hung’s Wong Fei Hung Ji Saam (West Territory Mighty Lion/Once upon a Time in China and America, 1997), Master Huang Fei-hong (Jet Li Lin- jie) travels to the Wild West to visit an American branch of the Po Chi Lam Clinic set up by his student Sol. During the journey, he bangs his head against a rock in a turbulent stream and loses his memory. He is rescued by a friendly tribe of Indi- ans. Moments before we see Huang again, an Indian emerges from a tepee proudly announcing the birth of a child. When Huang recovers, he stumbles around in the Indian camp wearing an Indian costume, and his loose unbraided hair is flowing like an Indian’s. After using his martial arts prowess to defeat a hostile Indian, who ironically mouths racist American platitudes against the outsider—”His clothing is different, his skin color is different, his speech is different”—Huang is adopted into the tribe and given the name “Yellow.” Before this, he attempts to remember events of the recent past. But his vague recollections reveal images reproducing culturally blurred boundaries paralleling his sense of ethnic and geographic dis- placement. During the recent past of his stagecoach journey through America, Aunt Yee/Thirteenth Aunt/Shishanyi (Rosamund Kwan Chi-lam) had taught him English while Seven/Club Foot (Xong Xin-xin) watched Huang. Club Foot then expresses his yearning for a traditional bowl of Chinese rice rather than Western diarrhea-inducing beans. Huang’s memory returns in images that mix his actual national memory with the new experiences he encounters in his unfamiliar new environment. While Yee and Seven repeat their earlier lines, their Indian counterparts inhabit their bodies. The Indian princess (Chrysta Bell Eucht) wears Yee’s Western costume and asks Huang, “What is your name?” Her brother takes Club Foot’s position on the stagecoach. Stranded traveler Billy (Jeff Wolfe) is now an Indian, and Huang finally falls from the coach pierced by an Indian lance. These images form minor incidents in the entire narrative structure of Once upon a Time in China and America (1997), the sixth part of Tsui Hark’s epic series. Tony Williams is a professor and area head of Film Studies in the Department of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has written numerous articles on film and literature and several books, including Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an American Filmmaker (1997). © 2000 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 3 However, as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) once remarked, if historical issues may “be found in life’s irrelevances,”1 significant structures of feeling may appear in visual and sound motifs seemingly marginal to the main narrative. In Once upon a Time in China and America, these motifs echo themes that dominate the entire series produced by Tsui Hark, namely, the continuing challenges of historical change and geographic relocation and the need for constant adaptation whenever the Chinese hero finds himself in new situations. The Once upon a Time in China series represents one of the major achieve- ments of 1990s Hong Kong cinema. Focusing on the character of legendary martial artist Huang Fei-hong, the series differs from its predecessors by dealing with issues central to contemporary Hong Kong as it reached the end of one historical epoch and moved toward another. In 1997, Hong Kong lost its status as a British crown colony and became reunified with mainland China. Although the series is set in the historical past, like most Hong Kong New Wave films, it also looks with foreboding at the implications of reunification as each film was made increasingly closer to the date of that event. By casting mainland Chinese actor Jet Li Lian-jie (who had relocated to Hong Kong) in a role popularly associated from 1949 to 1983 with Cantonese veteran film and televi- sion actor Kwan Tak-hing, the series raised questions of continuity and change. Like their fictional counterparts in the series, Hong Kong inhabitants faced problems associated with the new historical era that raised questions about their formerly secure sense of identity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese people underwent a turbulent series of changes in cultural perspectives and political realignments, increased their contact with Western pow- ers, and were confronted with new technologies. Because of its status as a crown colony, Hong Kong remained relatively free from the challenges facing the motherland. However, this changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the colony faced a different form of challenge. By focusing on issues faced by the mainland in the historical past, the Once upon a Time in China series raised questions that were also relevant to the contemporary population of Hong Kong. Would old values suffice any longer? How would people cope with change and possible loss of identity? Would another form of diaspora, whether mental or geographic, be possible? The series indirectly suggests some possible resolutions, albeit in a fictional manner. It also works on two levels. First, it deals with the perennial problem of China’s relationship to the Western world as perceived by its traditional-minded hero, Huang Fei-hong, who adapts to the turbulent circumstances around him in each part of the series. But, second, it functions as an allegory for the changes the Hong Kong population faced as it moved toward 1997. Because of censorship, Hong Kong films generally avoided direct representations of political issues, especially one as explosive as reunification. In the light of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Tsui Hark’s series attempted to address issues of change, adaptability, and the possible diaspora facing Hong Kong’s people, who were known for settling in different parts of the globe, as well as for being identified with their national homeland. Since the series gradually sees its hero moving in a Western, rather than an Eastern, direction, Part Six naturally locates 4 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 him in America. Once again, issues concerning the relationship between traditional and modern Western values come to the forefront in Tsui Hark’s contribu- tion to this perennial cultural debate. Many features of the Once upon a Time in China series are thus not entirely divorced from the present: dispersion, China’s relationship to the outside world, and strategic forms of reintegration designed to strengthen national identity. This latter aspect is crucially important throughout the series. Parts Two and Four ar- gue against xenophobic, isolationist tendencies, which hampered Chinese devel- opment in the twentieth century from the Boxer riots (1900) to the mainland Chinese cultural revolution (1965–1968). Throughout the series, Hark implicitly argues for a realistic, open-minded appraisal of issues affecting Chinese national identity and the need for change and compromise. It is a message as relevant to the pre-1997 population of Hong Kong as it is to Hark’s own fictional reconstruc- tion of Huang Fei-hong, who moves from a position of cultural certainty to con- front twentieth-century encroachments affecting his previously secure sense of Chinese identity. In reuniting with the motherland, the formerly lost orphan of Hong Kong faces similar issues of cultural readjustment. Hark attempts to negoti- ate these problems both allegorically and cinematically by using the figure of Huang Fei-hong as a cultural focus who represents the problematic aspects of cultural identity and the necessity for continual readaptation. Historical “Interflow” versus Postmodernist Strategies. Mingyu Yang sees the Once upon a Time in China series as a contemporary mythic and allegorical response to the 1997 crisis that marked Hong Kong’s return to mainland China.2 Although Yang notes the historical background that structures each film, he be- lieves each work reflects an ironic carnivalesque postmodernist strategy that blurs history, politics, and fiction and that parodies the traditional concept of the hero played by Jet Li-Lian-jie. Yang notes that several historical, literary, and cultural codes have determined several of the representations of the real Huang Fei-hong (1847–1924), whose actual historical significance has become clouded by myth and legend.3 Although Yang makes a plausible case for his particular interpreta- tion, the series may be read quite differently. As Stephen Teo has pointed out, certain Hong Kong films might be defined as postmodernist; however, Hong Kong cinema displays its own particular form of postmodernism, which may not parallel Western models regarding the supposedly relative and redundant nature of history. Indeed, it is a postmodernism fully cognizant of the important roles of cultural, historical, and political questions. Seeing Tsui Hark as one example of this special Hong Kong phenomenon. Teo points out that many causes and effects influenced it, such as “new wave aesthetics mixed with Cinema City-style slapstick, anxiety over 1997 and the China syndrome, the assertion of Hong Kong’s own identity as different from China, and a new sexual awakening arising from an increasing awareness of women’s human rights and the decriminalization of homosexuality.”4 Even the diversely opposite postmodernist films of comedian Stephen Chaio exhibit social and historical features, such as criti- cism of “Hongkie” snobbery against mainlanders and the recognition that Hong Cinema Journal 40, No.

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