Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai

Interview with Qin Yi July 4, 2009

Interview with Qin Yi July 4, 2009 Richard J. Meyer — RJM Qin Yi — QY RJM: I became very interested in Wang Renmei after we had that discussion in Shanghai. Do you have any names and addresses of people who are still alive and knew Wang Renmei? QY: She has no immediate family. She had a brother who played the violin but he passed away last year. Her brother might have children who may still be alive. RJM: What is the name of the brother? QY: Wang Renlu. RJM: And he lived in Shanghai? 102 Interview with Qin Yi QY: Yes. Wang’s other brother has also passed away recently. He lived in Shanghai. He might have had children, too. If the two brothers were still alive, they would be in their nineties, so their children are probably 50 or 60 years old. RJM: I found out that her brothers paid for Wang’s school tuition after her father died. QY: Yes. Maybe it’s that way. RJM: Did you appear on screen with Wang Renmei? QY: I made a Àlm in 1951 with her and it was called Liangjia Chun. RJM: How was it working with her? Could you describe some examples? QY: I liked working with her because she really enjoyed it as she had a very outgoing personality. She was a real extrovert. She had a nickname. Her nickname was “wildcat.” Before liberation, she made a whole bunch of films and she was really outgoing and exuberant and that was the reason why Jin Yan liked her—not because she was goodlooking but because she had such a vibrant, outgoing, and enthusiastic personality. When we were shooting Liangjia Chun, actually Wang Renmei didn’t have a lot of experience. I played the main role and Wang Renmei was just playing some young girl. Wang Renmei was so outgoing that whenever we had any free time, she would go to the countryside and buy the local Interview with Qin Yi 103 goods that farmers were selling, such as liquor or chicken livers, and she would bring them back, give them to me and say, “Jin Yan likes these, take them back to him.” She would also buy flour from nearby farmers and they didn’t have a lot to eat at that time, so whatever they had, she would put in Áour and fry it with a little bit of sugar and then mix it up and it would be really good. One of the things that she cooked was beef bone marrow and she would fry it in flour and sugar and they thought it was great—it tasted really good. At that time, Wang Renmei still regretted the divorce quite a bit and I would see her. It wasn’t so much that she thought she was some great woman, she just felt bad about the divorce because Wang Renmei had a really bad temper. Once she started Àghting with Jin Yan, she would just go off. She still felt bad about the situation. She was a little envious. Later, the company in Shanghai transferred her to Beijing because her mood became so bad that she became very depressed. It was even worse than depression, so they sent her off to Beijing. If you don’t want to, you don’t need to write all of this. You can pick and choose because this is kind of an embarrassing thing. I felt sorry for her and felt a lot of sympathy for her, but it was too late because I was already married to Jin Yan. There was nothing that I could do. Wang Renmei herself was actually a very nice person. I was very good to her so she felt really bad about it. 104 Interview with Qin Yi Also, she didn’t have any malice. She would bring something back and she would say, “Oh, take this back to Jin Yan.” It was completely without malice. She just said, “He likes this, so take it back.” RJM: No jealousy? QY: I was not jealous. She was just very open. She knew that this was an established fact and she hoped that we had a good relationship—a good marriage. But there was no way to get over her nostalgia for Jin Yan. Everyone was really mature. RJM: Did you associate socially, at any time, with Wang Renmei? QY: In the course of making...