Rumming Dai (Film Viewing & Criticism) : My Great Grandmother and the Old Shanghai Film Era
The film frame above comes from my grandmother’s 1929 film, Love Sea Kiss. The film plays here.
My great grandmother Tianxiu Tang was a famous film star in the 20s. She entered the film industry when she started to play a role in Mother’s Happiness. (Tang) The directors were impressed by her acting skills. As a result, she got signed into Great China Lilium Film Studio immediately and started her acting career. Subsequently, she played major roles in over thirty films and was adored by a large audience for her appearance and outstanding acting skills. In the 30s, however, as the film industry entered the sound era, she had to quit the screen. Part of the problem was the language my great grandmother spoke— Shanghainese.
As recently as the 1930s, the Mandarin language was not widely spoken in China. Before the institution of the Republic of China (1912-1949), people from different regions spoke very different languages. North of the Yangtze River, people spoke the northern language family, which eventually became Mandarin. Southeast of Yangtze River, people spoke Shanghainese. Further south, people spoke Hokkien, Cantonese and lots of small dialects. People from different regions couldn’t quite understand each other, as in Europe, where people who speak Spanish can only understand a little bit of Italian and French, all Romance languages.
After Republic of China formed, as part of the 1919 New Culture Movement, the Republic of China government started to popularize a national language. This required people from all different regions to speak the same language. The government then decided to use Beijing dialect of the northern language family as the common language of Republic of China because Beijing had always been the political center since ancient China. More people understood the Beijing dialect than any other since it used to be the “official language.” Thus Mandarin—the nationalized version of the Beijing dialect— was born. During the sound era in China, actors and actresses were asked to speak Mandarin in films in order to enable people all over the country to understand the contents. Mandarin insured a bigger market at that time.
Because Mandarin was a northern region language family dialect, southern people who were born before Republic of China formed in 1912 didn’t have a chance to learn this language. In a lot of places, like Shanghai, people continued speaking Shanghainese. My great grandmother Tianxiu was one of them.
My great grandmother spoke Shanghainese her whole life. Mandarin to her was just like a foreign language even though more and more young people started to speak the new national language. Since people outside Shanghai couldn’t understand her, Great China Lilium Film Studio could only let her play secondary roles in some major films. She couldn’t keep up with the market. So eventually Tianxiu chose to retire from the film industry.
After retiring from the screen, she lived in a big mansion in Shanghai. At that time, Shanghai was an international capital of fashion, like New York City now. As my grandmother remembers, my great grandmother always wore shiny a Bob hairstyle and the most fashionable clothes even after retirement. She was an “It Girl.” In the 1930s, while most Chinese women simply just put long hair in a bun at the back of their heads, the fashion-forward “It Girls” started to cut their hair ear to ear. This hair style was known as the Bob, and the best Bob was the one with big curls. Even though my great grandmother was not a film star anymore, she still carefully put on makeup, ironed her hair and spent quite a long time choosing clothes every morning.
In the 1960s, the Culture Revolution erupted in China. It was a frustrating time in Chinese history. Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Tse-ung, the government at that time wanted to destroy the “Four Olds,” by which Mao meant old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. My great grandmother’s works were their first target. As revolutionary communist militants saw them, my great grandmother’s films represented capitalism. They expressed capitalist values. For example, in her film Kisses Once (1929), she wears fancy clothes, drinks fine wine and entertains. These activities sound normal right now, but during the Culture Revolution, this conduct was against the government’s idea of “common prosperity,” which meant everyone should have the same amount of money.
Moreover, because my great grandmother’s husband was a wealthy businessman who complained about the new government and the anti-rich policies that Mao’s government enforced, Mao’s militant young activists, “the Red Guards, ” reported him to authorities as an “anti-revolution wealthy.” This stigmatizing was the biggest sin in the 1960s. Once identified as an “anti-revolutionary wealthy,” my great grandfather was handcuffed immediately and imprisoned. In the prison, he died of illness. As a consequence, Red Guard militants identified my great grandmother herself as an “anti-revolution wealthy.” They supervised her to perform “labor reforms” every day at home. According to the government, enforced labor could purify people’s mind.
The Red Guard burned everything that showed wealth and luxury. Of course, my great grandmother’s stage photos and daily life photos didn’t survive. Vanished, too, were her boxes of fancy dresses. Rich people at that time lived under the “Red Terror,” the terror enforced by Red Guards around them. They had to be extra alert to avoid participating in any “anti-revolution” event. After the new People’s Republic of China began in 1949, the local film studio in Shanghai got replaced by studios that were owned by the government. In the Cultural Revolution, almost all films that were created before the new China got destroyed. Film negatives vanished. The fragmentary pictures we see today are the ones that escaped from that catastrophe. That is the reason why we can only find online very limited photos of the Chinese film stars at that time.
As my great grandmother got older, she started to develop senile dementia. My grandmother said that my great grandmother would sit by the window and count birds flying by the tree outside every day. But who knows if she was trying to recall memories back to when she was still a famous film star. That existence to her was like a dream far away from reality. Sadly, she died in 1966 at the age of 66.
After watching Kisses Once (1929) (Qinghai Chongwen) played by my great grandmother, I had a complicated feeling about the main character, Lijun. Kisses Once is a silent film. It derived from Cecil B. DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). However, because no one had access to foreign films except the producers at that time, my great grandmother didn’t know the relationship between Kisses Once and Don’t Change Your Husband. In the story, Lijun tries to leave her husband to find true love but ends up getting played by her lover. When she comes to regret what she had done, she starts to rethink the meaning of following the new western culture. The film begins with Lijun’s happiness and ends with her regression. This character was the kind of woman in Shanghai stuck between traditional Chinese culture and modern Western culture.
At that time in Shanghai, the early 1930s, a lot of Western people started to come in and lived by Huangpu River. It was the first time Western culture started to influence Chinese culture. Shanghai was then a cultural melting pot, mixing Eastern culture and Western culture together. At that time, no one knew if this would be good or bad. In the film, you can find Western architecture style, furniture style, food styles, even fashion styles which were considered modern at that time in Shanghai. What’s more, in the film there were even handwritten English subtitles under Chinese subtitles intelligible to all literate Chinese viewers. (Although people from different regions spoke different languages, all read one unified kind of Chinese character. So no matter where the audiences were from, they could all understand the content of the film.)
Despite the otherwise rare Western styles visible in the film, it was the female characters who impressed me the most in Kisses Once. The idea of the “new woman” became visible to audiences. In the film, modern young ladies wearing fancy Qipaos, a traditional silk gown that was popularized by Chinese socialites and upper-class women in Shanghai, and Western high heels and short hair were quite an icon. Especially when Lijun first shows up in the film, she wears fashionable pants. This costume marked an important turning point in the Chinese film history. Before the Republic of China era, women had been wearing only dresses for a long time. Pants were only for heavy labor work. They never equaled to fashion. It was not appropriate for upper class woman to wear pants in public as it was considered lower class apparel. Wearing pants in the film, Tianxiu symbolized a calling of liberty. In Western culture, the feminist movement made wearing pants symbolize independence. Along with the New Cultural Movement of 1919, this Western feminist movement influenced Chinese people at that time to raise their awareness about the importance of freeing women. In Kisses Once, my great grandmother plays the first new woman in Chinese film history.
In this film, I found evidences of Western influences on Chinese culture not only from the outfits that people were wearing in the film but also from the way people thought. From traditional Chinese perspective, Lijun is a destroyer of family happiness in Kisses Once. But she is a victim who gets cheated by the wrong man. She is like Madame Bovary, who chases after so-called romantic love blindly but only gets a bad result in the end. She is also like Anna Karenina, who betrays her husband but suffers from feelings of moral guilt at the same time. As those western characters did, Lijun in this movie struggles between the traditional Chinese culture and modern Western culture. She can’t control her own life and she cannot imagine her own future. From the outside, Lijun is a modern young lady chasing after the love she wants. She is the pioneer of the liberty spirits in China. But inside, she is tortured by traditional moral dilemmas. In reality, she is not able to get the romantic love she wants. Instead, she pays a painful price for that. Lijun’s dilemmas is exactly what people in Shanghai faced at that time.
In the 20s, Chinese people in Shanghai were brought up with traditional Chinese culture which tells you to follow what your parents and husband want you to do. But as that generation grew up, the Western culture entering China started to influence them as well. On the one hand, people were afraid to abandon the traditional ideas. On the other hand, they wanted to free their minds and try new things. It was this clash of culture that made the people in Shanghai lose their direction to the true self. This was a conflicted generation.
Kisses Once made every Chinese, especially young Shanghainese women who wanted to try new culture, rethink profoundly. The film played in big cities where modern western culture existed, while in rural areas, farmers didn’t have a chance to view any new film or know the changing of culture. Lijun’s actions and her ending were also what people in the big 
cities most thought about. They kept challenging their moral limitation. I have to say, however, that in the end, the director of the film takes an anti-modern and anti-Western view. In the end of the film, it is Lijun’s father, the one who represents traditional Chinese culture, who helps Lijun go back to a normal life after all the mess she made because of trying new culture. The director still wanted audiences to value traditional Chinese culture as their moral limits.
The divorce scene in Kisses Once was also one of the firsts in Chinese film history. At that time in China, only men could write women divorce letters. Women never had a chance to leave their men. But in this film, Lijun was able to file the divorce letter to her husband. Although this act didn’t’t end up well, by merely acting this way, Lijun had already became the symbol of new woman who was brave enough to follow her mind and chase after her own happiness.
Lijun asks in Kisses Once, “What will be my future position?” Countless people at that time in Shanghai got similarly lost. What Lijun asks expresses not just one women’s confusion. It is also that generation’s confusion under the huge clash of cultures. It was a problem that China needed to solve in the transition of changing from a feudal to a modern society. The social and moral values were waiting to be rebuilt. This film is an icon of that time.
In her own real life, my great grandmother was actually one of the first women who filed divorce letters to their husbands. Her previous husband, Xiangsheng Tang, was an idle fellow. He did not have a job and all his living expenses were dependent on my great grandmother. Even worse, he abused her for shooting romantic scenes with other actors. What he did made my great grandmother feel unsafe and stressed. Influenced by the new culture, she finally decided to divorce him and did so successfully. Later, she married a successful rich man and had an easier rest of her life. I don’t know if playing this character in Kisses Once made my great grandmother decide in her own life to proceed with a real-life divorce, but I think this film might have opened a new door for her to see the options of life choices she could have.
My grandmother emphasizes that my great grandmother Tianxiu loved flowers. There was always a fresh kaffir lily in the vase by her bed. She never forgot to water the flower. The Kaffir lily represents elegance, bravery and strength. I think the flower is just like my great grandmother. She was brave, strong and willing to try the new culture while continuing to chase after truth her whole life. She was indeed the new women.
Works Cited
“Tianxiu Tang.” IMDb. IMDb.com. Accessed October 15, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2058633/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
“Qinghai Chongwen.” IMDb. IMDb.com. Accessed October 15, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832439.
In the 1930s, Shanghai was a throbbing, cosmopolitan, international city. People from everywhere lived and worked there. At night, Shanghai looked and sounded like this: