The first time I watched the film, I was amazed. It was sometime between my third and fourth semesters in college, a few months prior to the first pandemic lockdown in the U.S. After years of hearing about it — praise, but mostly legendary paratextual stories — Farewell My Concubine delivered everything I had heard of and all that I didn’t know I had hoped for.
But it was not until the second time I watched it — during the height of the pandemic summer amid chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” — that something clicked.
The year was 1924, and Douzi was the child of a prostitute. Finding him too big and difficult to keep at the brothel, the young mother dropped him at the Peking Opera Academy, where a regiment of other abandoned or orphaned boys live and train in near militaristic routines in hope of one day becoming famous, successful and beloved. It was a society when actors and sex workers had much in common — the base entertainers for others’ enjoyment and pleasure.
Douzi would grow to become one of the biggest opera stars, along with his best friend, Shitou. Together, they would become the de facto cast for the king and the concubine in the famous Chinese opera of the same name, Farewell My Concubine. They would also take up the stage names Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang). Over the course of two and a half hours, the film depicts more than half a century of political turmoils in 20th century China, filtered through the stories of Dieyi and Xiaolou’s love and betrayals, life and art.
Like other things I did that summer, in 2020, I could not easily explain why I watched the film again one day late at night. Maybe I was bored of scrolling on my phone and wanted a larger screen; or of social media and news that I wanted something something more immersive. Or maybe I was just sleepless, or too scared to fall asleep with no tomorrow to look forward to so I put on a long movie. The days were slow and repetitive that summer. The campus had mostly emptied itself since March following the state’s stay-at-home order, and I was one of the few dozens of students permitted to remain as an international student in need. I had been staying in a triple dorm room alone for three months up to that night. Despite pities from friends at home in China or in the U.S., I considered myself fortunate and willingly accepted the accommodation. Because my initial plan was to stay in the U.S. that summer anyway, and the college had simply saved me time and troubles of finding alternative housing. Yet, my elation from secure living situation quickly turned into growing suffocation, first from cancellations of internships and parties and festival gatherings, then from violence and protests and geopolitical bickering. Not only was life suddenly defined by four concrete walls and their echoes, but also screens and frequencies in a digital vacuum. My support system was far-away, and in an eager pursuit of a more authentic self, I further self-isolate. In those conditions, I was quick to forget the past, and with no tomorrow to look forward to, the present felt like forever.
Maybe in an attempt to resuscitate what I had in me that still felt human and alive, and to experience an illusion of connection to a larger history and people like me, I turned to the movie.
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I watched and rewatched a lot of films that summer. Most of them were either sci-fi or realist horrors or thrillers with an undertone of social critique. But it was Concubine — a film that was then almost thirty years old, first released in 1993 to a cheering crowd at the Cannes Film Festival and took home the Palme d’Or as the first and only Chinese film in the prize’s list of awardees — that really cut deep.
It was about history. Growing up in a fast-developing Chinese city in the 2000s, my media arts exposure consisted essentially of Hollywood’s cinematic imports and Chinese TVs of all sorts — soap operas of campus first loves, family dramas, reality TVs, cartoons, everything. I learned about trust and loyalty in friendships, of duties and honor within family and chosen communities, of varying standards of beauty, technological futures, heartbreaks and minor feelings. What I never seemed to learn from these until Concubine was history.
Ironically, historical drama has always been one of the most popular genres of Chinese literature and screen culture. Yet what Concubine offered was more than a setting, a facade of fitting temporality. The historical context was a parallel story of itself. It had its own rhythm, spinning on with little to no regard for our protagonists’ hopes and love. It forged them into the arrogant, indulgent, pathetic, or stubborn selves they all are, simultaneously creating them, destroying them, and rebirthing them into new iterations whose judge ultimately is time itself.
Until then, they are judged by other people. Dieyi and Xiaolou come of age during the transitions of empires and regimes. From the early days of the Republic of China with remnants of the overthrown Qing Dynasty, to the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in the Civil War, to its reforms of the country, Dieyi and Xiaolou keep singing and performing. The audience keeps changing; the setting and size of the stage, too. But their costume, their act and the art remain. That is the hope, at least, a hope that Dieyi would go to war for while Xiaolou would readily cede.
The gap between individual power and the enormity of their ambition is one of the most universal human experiences and one of the richest source for stories across culture throughout history. A person desires something, sets out to get it yet encounters an assortment of hurdles both external or internal. Depending on the culture nuances, settings and the particular storytelling traditions, the story unfolds differently. While Hollywood has finessed and mastered this narrative structure with great financial gains, relying on legible personal ambitions and a hero’s journey laden with conflicts and problem-solving, other cultures tell stories with lesser personal agency. Compared to the David-and-Goliath tale, the happy ending in the Chinese lore of the Foolish Old Man trying to remove the mountains is not simply a result of individual merits — strength, wit, patience, perseverance etc. — but also at the mercy of gods. The harmony between individual virtues and celestial benevolence; the reconciliation between the person and their fate. In Concubine, none of the protagonists’ desires drive the momentum of the story. Neither is Dieyi’s desire simple or legible. His ambition — to perform opera alongside his senior brother Xiaolou for as long as they could — is both innocent and incredibly complex, and his love and trust towards Xiaolou is simultaneously brotherly, romantic and reflective of a misplaced Oedipal impulse. In other words, the layered interiority of repression from family, society and history of Dieyi feels distinctly Chinese.
Dieyi does not bow to his fate. Fate does not reconcile with him either. At one point, Juxian (Gong Li), a prostitute who later marries Xiaolou to Diego’s despondence, asks Xiaolou, “I don’t know if it’s the ways of the world that don’t agree with your junior brother [Dieyi], or if he just can’t get along with the ways of the world.” In a sense, none of the boys in the Opera Academy is favored by fate. Some defected, some endured, some killed themselves, and some became professionals or stars like Dieyi and Xiaolou. But outside the opera troupe is life itself. Unable and unwilling to distinguish between life on stage and that off stage, Dieyi submits to a headstrong faithfulness to opera and the master’s preaching. “From the beginning to the end,” he vividly recalls from the master. In the final act, Dieyi and Xiaolou meet on an empty rehearsal stage in full costumes. The Cultural Revolution has just ended, and they haven’t performed together in over two decades. In his last act of loyalty and consummating his total devotion to the art — which is everything he knows and loves and aspires to — he takes the sword and slays himself, just like his character, concubine Yuji, actually does in the story.
“There is no Cheng Dieyi after Leslie Cheung,” journalists, filmmakers, fans and critics alike liked to say. In real life, on April 1, 2003, Leslie Cheung leapt out of his hotel balcony and ended his life. As cruel as a joke it seemed at the time, the finality of Cheung’s life and Dieyi’s along with other parallels they shared further colored the film with legendary qualities — if only in melancholy. Yet Dieyi’s response to his unfortunate fate — in all its mania and single-minded craze, sorrow and dejected self-destruction — is nothing but melancholy in its core.
On the occasion of the film’s 30-year anniversary, the film’s co-screenwriter, Lu Wei, gave an interview to the relatively liberal Chinese state media The Paper early this summer. “After watching Yellow Earth, I thought Chinese cinema finally is ready to tell stories about its own history, and its people’s true, lived experiences on its land, and in an artful way.” He thus accepted the director’s invite to collaborate.
Watching Dieyi, Xiaolou and their opera troupe move through 70 years of modern Chinese history over nearly 3 hours, I experienced history and life as a flowing river again instead of hundreds of thousands of droplets of water.
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There is the cultural myth that Chinese people are good at enduring pain. In the mid 1930s, the Chinese linguist and philosopher Lin Yutang wrote in his first-of-its-kind English-language book My Country and My People that one of the Chinese national characteristics was “the enormous capacity for endurance in suffering.” The reasons for the lasting civilization were importantly, if only partially, attributed to the “strength of their coarse nerves.”
Another age-old saying goes, “hao si bu ru lai huo (好死不如赖活)” meaning “it’s better to live a wretched life than to die a good death.” The message here is to encourage people living in hard times, to cherish what they have and appreciate their life, rather than agonizing over what they lack.
It seems that to the Chinese as a nation, existence itself is the utmost gift regardless of its quality. The surrender to a Confucian fatalism is indicative of the national virtues of patience as “a great source of peace and contentment”, but Lin cautioned that it can also easily turn into a vice of “morbid tolerance of evil.”
Perhaps like many between 2020 and 2021, I was constantly anxious, emotional like never before, and occasionally feeling I was nearing psychosis. Reports have shown a fivefold increase of people seeking mental health support from 2019–2021. The percentage of people scoring at risk for psychosis-like experiences reached its highest level in early 2021. I thought of seeking professional help but never did — partly because of fear from the unknown because I have never had a mental counselor before, and the rest being skepticism and laziness. I wonder how much more would it take me to take the leap. You can only be helped if you want to be helped, as a mentor used to say to me.
How much more would it take for my people to take the leap? A leap from enduring to — well, anything. The tightening of speech and art in a fractured and impossible time demands fractured and impossible solutions. Since that night of watching the film for the second time alone in the triple dorm room, I continued to stay on the mostly empty campus for another year until returning to China for the next summer, and then coming back to start work. I have since quit and moved to New York for graduate school. The image of the dressed-up Dieyi and Xiaolou in smeared makeup in the struggle session scene would return to me in late November 2022 when protests swept across dozens of Chinese cities.
The year the film premiered, it has only been four years since the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the June Fourth massacre. For a brief two weeks, the film opened in Shanghai’s Grand Theater to a teeming crowd whose enthusiasm congested streets and shattered 12-millimeter-thick show window glasses. Then the film was banned, circulated through limited DVDs and on pirated film websites. Today, the mere existence of the film and films like that itself would be a miracle. It has been an open secret for at least the past ten or twenty years.
We don’t talk about it in the open enough, and we lack the language to do so. Sometimes I fear I am losing grip of this period of time when artists can still portray history and discuss real life in unpolluted, though filtered, ways. I fear my isolation and physical distance from my culture, my history, would only grow my political melancholy.
A professor who was a new hire in my department in fall 2020 was teaching a class on existentialist philosophy and wanted to meet some students. He was a native in the neighborhood but only recently returned for the job. He was happy to meet up and chat before the semester officially started — I think we both needed it. It was a beautiful late summer afternoon. The campus was still quiet, and we sat on a wooden bench near an oak tree. We talked about the neighborhood, our shared passion for philosophy, teaching or learning during the pandemic, why we moved away from our homes and why he chose to come back. Towards the end of the conversation, he told me I was “very well-adjusted.”
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Maybe I was well-adjusted, after all, despite my secretly desperate wish for the comfort of being diagnosed. I contemplated about death a lot and burrowed myself into Camus’ defense against suicide, but I never actually seriously thought of hurting myself.
Maybe melancholy was not an inappropriate response to summer 2020. Maybe melancholy was the least objectionable and the only reasonable response. Maybe my depressiveness, my manic episodes, my mood swings between self-deflation and arrogance were not symptoms of some kind of illness, but rather, the exact indicator of my well-adjusted-ness, after all.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Is Dieyi well-adjusted to his times? Is the tragedy of his romantic stubbornness a testament to the twistedness of his surroundings — his manic love for theater and effusive melancholy a sign of his righteousness and adaptiveness? What should we demand of the society about individuality? How does our perception of fate influence our personal agency and collective responsibilities?
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It was early October this year, 2023, that I watched the film fully, without interruption, from the beginning to the end, for the third time. But I was with dozens of people in a sold out theater at Film Forum in New York City. What was also different was the film itself, which was a 4K restoration by Film Movement Classics in celebration of its 30th anniversary. It was also the first time the film was screened in its full, original length in the U.S. with an additional 14 minutes that were cut out by Harvey Weinstein’s request when he purchased the film’s rights in the U.K. and the U.S. back then. It was also the first time for me, too.
Fourteen minutes sound longer than they were experienced on screen. There wasn’t any new scene. The added minutes complement and complete existing ones: a few more seconds lingering on a look, a added minute-long episode where Dieyi witnesses a mass killing of Chinese hostages by Japanese soldiers after rescuing Xiaolou from the Japanese military.
As we emerged from the theater into the light, I wondered what was going on in other fellow audience members’ minds. Earlier in the theater, next to me sat two young Chinese, who annoyed me by taking photos during some of the more famous scenes. Was this the first time they watched the legend, which they’d long heard and read about, on the big screen? Were they excited or sad? What did the film remind them of? What mental associations did they make? To me, the image of the struggle sessions — of the parading “class enemies,” “anti-revolutionaries,” of the dressed-up Dieyi and Xiaolou — evoked to me the still punished, persecuted, imprisoned and disappeared today under a range of charges such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and “promoting extremism,” and names ranging from “hostile forces” to “secessionist.” Names of some of those young women, students, lawyers and courageous, ordinary civilians popped into my head. In the squirming crowd in the lobby of small groups of mixed races and faces, I thought about if I was the only one.
“Moving on — not dwelling on the past — has become a key survival tactic, perhaps the most important one.” Louisa Lim writes in her 2014 nonfiction book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, exploring lives of the people who were affected by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the June Fourth massacre. There are many things that I fear people have already forgotten about even though they had just happened.
But our story does not have to end like the movie, in which, during the rehearsal in that deep blue spotlight, Dieyi fulfills his fate as the opera fanatic and the role of the devoted concubine by grabbing the sword and taking his life.
“The most interesting conversations about China today happen underground,” the New York Times columnist and reporter Yuan Li said in the introduction of her podcast. It does feel that way whenever I click into the purple app and tune into an episode, sneaking into conversations about the state of the world between Yuan and her guests, whose voices are sometimes altered to protect their identities. It’s a tremendous labor of love with little to no financial returns. On the day that I type these words, the digital archive China Unofficial Archive was launched. It provides sources and information to nearly 900 digital assets — books, films, archival images etc. — which seek to address the imbalance between official governmental accounts of history and other grassroots narratives. And just a month earlier, in November 2023, at an event on reporting from exile at Asia Society, I was able to hear Yuan speak in person. Little of what she said during that event was new to me, but the ability to bear witness to a long suppressed idea uttered aloud in real time in a crowd — that was intoxicating and something I had that Dieyi did not have the fortune for in the film. Perhaps New York, with its 8 million people, is a good choice to start rebuilding connections to other people. Perhaps in such as city as suffocating as it can be empowering, we don’t have to always endure alone.
Instead of a book of morbid tolerance and melancholy, we could try, with all our inherited virtues of patience and perseverance, to write alternative stories.
Written in New York City. December, 2023.