Abstract
This chapter looks at the unconventional life journey of Hong Huang. With her bold appeal to contemporary Chinese women to act liberally regarding their love and sexual issues, Hong Huang deserves to be called a genuine “a highborn ruffian feminist.” As a female entrepreneur in the media industry and a feminist prose writer, Hong Huang is a beacon of light for the modern Chinese woman.
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Notes
- 1.
Zhang Shizhao was a famous democratic, scholar, writer, educator and politician during the Republic Era and the early period of socialist China, who formed an ongoing friendship with Mao Zedong. Zhang Shizhao joined the Xinhai Revolution (the 1911 Revolution) in order to overthrow the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) and to save China from its backward and deteriorating destiny. In this way, he and his peers controlled their own fate and that of their nation.
- 2.
Chen Ran’s novel A Private Life (Siren shenghuo 2000) employs body and sexual politics to engage with political sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen democratic demonstration. According to Mottier (1998, p. 113), “Sexual identities are politically relevant since they are constituted within fields of power. They are not merely the expression of natural instinct, but are social as well as political constructs… As a result, and against the backdrop of individualization and detraditionalisation processes, sexuality is not a predefined ‘given’ anymore. It has become an empty signifier, opening up to plural meanings and interpretations.” Chen Ran’s novel A Private Life enlists the female body and sexuality as a springboard from which the writer expresses her disappointment and pain at both the male dominated social hierarchy and at the terminated demonstration at Tiananmen Square. For further discussion about Chen Ran’s A Private Life, see Kay Schaffer and Xianlin Song, 2006, “Narrative, Trauma and Memory: Chen Ran’s A Private Life: Tiananmen Square and Female Embodiment”.
- 3.
Even if Zhang Hanzhi has been one of the most “intimate” persons around chairman Mao Zedong, she was severely criticized and publicly denounced during the Cultural Revolution, which was the peak of a series political movements and struggles launched by Mao and his followers.
- 4.
When Hong Huang talking with Ning Ying, a friend and a film director, Ning Ying suggested making a film about their own life experiences, which was the original idea of producing Perpetual Motion. Hong Huang thought it a good idea. So friends met and decided to do it. The film was shot at the courtyard house where Hong Huang’s mother used to live (the courtyard house has been returned to the Chinese government after Hong Huang’s mother died), and Hong Huang’s mother played in a cameo role in the film.
- 5.
Jiang Wen (b. 1963) is widely regarded as one of China’s best actors, as evidenced by his many film roles such as “my grandpa” in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Honggaoliang, 1988), the counter-revolutionary “crazy Qin” in Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town (Furongzhen, 1987). However, Jiang Wen’s gifts are not limited to acting in films; he is also a successful film auteur. In his 1994 directorial debut, In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994), Jiang Wen harnessed a “revolutionized erotic desire” to give a romantic and nostalgic revamp to the discourse of Maoist China, which is revealed by sensual anecdotes and sexual encounters of a group of teenagers during the zenith of the Cultural Revolution. By 2007, Jiang Wen had made only three movies since embarking on his voyage of directing in 1994; he is not a prolific director and nor have his films conformed to a recognized genre. However, Jiang Wen’s two most recent films, Let the Bullets Fly (Rang zidan fei, 2010) and Gone with the Bullets, are distinctive products in the present-day Chinese film marketplace with their own signature style—what might be termed “absurdist” films or “serious nonsense comedy.” These two films exhibit Jiang Wen’s use of allegorical visual images that convey subtle social criticisms and political comments. Jiang Wen’s innovative and inspirational use of visual expressions, together with his engaging plot design and intriguing characters construction, shape his fable-like movies; movies that tell the common truth through uncommon visual languages, storylines and protagonists. In this way, Jiang Wen correlates his films with the absurd and bigoted social reality of today’s China, and it is for this reason that his films have garnered prodigious appeal from the contemporary viewing public. For more discussion on Jiang Wen’s films, see my chapter “Jiang Wen and His Signature Films: Let the Bullets Fly and Gone with the Bullets”, in Contemporary Chinese Films and Celebrity Directors. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113–136.
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Cai, S. (2019). Hong Huang: An Unconventional Woman’s Life—The Highborn “Ruffian”. In: Cai, S. (eds) Female Celebrities in Contemporary Chinese Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5980-4_10
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