Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History

Chapter 2 Women and Martial Arts: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's Marital, Martial, and Marxian Problems

65 Chapter 2 WOMEN AND MARTIAL ARTS Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Marital, Martial, and Marxian Problems “Marriage is long-term prostitution.” —Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City” Feminist criticism of martial arts fiction as the expression of patriarchy is not new. Recently, however, the representation of women in martial arts fiction also became an object of postcolonial and globalization studies, a development that owes much to the phenomenal international box-office success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Postcolonial critics are surprised and delighted by the film’s novel focus on strong, independent women in a genre known for its masculine and muscular images: finally, a film from China that does not represent the subordination of women as natural and inevitable. Accordingly, the appearance of the film has invited critical commentary on the current state of feminist consciousness in China and speculations on whether China is becoming increasingly similar to the West. In other words, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon criticism, the analysis of gender has become inextricably tied to the interpretations of China’s colonial and postcolonial relations to the West. Another connection critics have made between the film and postcolonial studies is the fact that the film, produced by a Taiwanese director and an American scriptwriter, is set in an idealized, mythical China. Lee’s representation of China has led various critics to view the film as a reflection of the degree to which China has psychologically colonized Taiwan—or vice versa. Indeed, since Crouching Tiger, 66 CHAPTER 2 Hidden Dragon, tomes of articles and books have been published on Ang Lee’s “China complex.” Because of the film’s unprecedented visibility and prestige in international circles, the controversy surrounding the geopolitical origins of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has produced one of the most vibrant intersections of the scholarship on postcolonialism, feminism, and globalization for China studies in the past ten years. This chapter offers an intervention in these theoretical debates first by attending to the film’s correct historical origins: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was invented by neither Zhang Yimou, nor Ang Lee, nor James Schamus, but by an early twentieth-century Chinese martial arts novelist named Wang Dulu (1909–1977) in the late 1930s. It is therefore a historical error to read the story of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its putatively “radical” representation of women as a reflection of the state of feminism in China today. Instead, I argue that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a historically determinate response to the project of Chinese May Fourth feminism, which is specifically invested in the abolition of footbinding and the promotion of women’s literacy. Placing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the proper context of Chinese martial arts novels in the 1930s has important implications for contemporary debates. Such historicization reveals that, contrary to the common perception of the film as a postmodern feminist manifesto, in the literary contexts of the 1930s it was standard for martial arts novelists to represent a woman as the protagonist. This fact necessarily changes critical claims about the relation between gender and postcoloniality , neither of which can be comprehended in transhistorical terms. The highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for ten Academy Awards. It won four, in addition to three from BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and two Golden Globes. The surprising box-office success of a nondubbed, subtitled Chinese-language film naturally leads people to ask: What exactly distinguishes this film from the multitude of previous martial arts movies coming out of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Shanghai? The answer most critics find lies in the film’s novel treatment of the topic of women’s oppression, Women and Martial Arts 67 which is assumed to be a radical departure from the masculinist tradition defined and monopolized by the immortal icon of Bruce Lee. Since its international release, the film was perceived as a groundbreaking, defiant feminist manifesto designed to revolutionize a genre that has hitherto subordinated women to men. Feminist interpretations of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tend to treat the film as a belated Chinese version of Western liberalpluralism and feminism. John Eperjesi points out that promoting the film’s “feminist values” was an important marketing strategy during the prescreening phase for the film’s U.S. release, which is why “the queen of neo-conservative feminism,” Naomi Wolf, was drafted...