The ‘Queer Woman’ between Shanghai and Nanyang, 1920s–1930s

Abstract

This article examines the actress Yang Naimei and a movie produced by her film company entitled Qi nüzi (A Queer Woman, dir. Shi Dongshan, 1928), based on the recent suicide of Yu Meiyan, a headline-making femme fatale. Premiered in Shanghai in October 1928, Yang took the film on tour in British and Dutch colonies across Nanyang (today’s Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) between 1929 and 1931. This first film company founded by a woman in China and its sole film output have sunk into oblivion in Chinese film historiography. I argue that this disappearance reflects two acts of negligence: the negligence of the ‘queer woman’ (qi nüzi) vis-à-vis the canonical ‘new woman’ (xin nüxing), and that of diasporic/Sinophone film spectatorship outside China proper. Drawing on a miscellany of texts, this article excavates the forgotten ‘queer woman’ in Chinese film and inquires into the historical conditions that contributed to her omission. It also charts the cultural exchanges of films, performances, and discourses between Shanghai and Nanyang, illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of screening and performing in these interstitial spaces.

Keywords:

• Yang Naimei
• new woman
• early Chinese cinema
• Nanyang
• Sinophone film market

On May 24, 1928, the Shanghai film star Yang Naimei (1904–1960) announced, in the respected newspaper Shenbao, her decision to found a film company (Anonymous 1928b). The Nai-Mei Pictures Co. (its own English name) planned to produce a film about ‘the miseries of women’ (nüjie buxing), based on the recent suicide of Yu Meiyan (ca. 1898–1928), a headline-making femme fatale. Yang Naimei put together a strong team, with Shi Dongshan as director and Cai Chusheng as assistant director (Jue 1928; Cheng et al. [1963] 1981, 626), both of whom were to become preeminent figures in Chinese film history. Entitled Qi nüzi (A Queer Woman), the film premiered in Shanghai in October 1928 (Anonymous 1928c), and was taken by Yang on tour in British and Dutch colonies across Nanyang (today’s Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) between 1929 and 1931. The Nai-Mei Pictures Co. and its sole film output have sunk into oblivion. Apart from an entry in the authoritative filmography (Cheng et al. [1963] 1981, 626), this first film produced by a woman in China is not discussed in either Cheng Jihua’s official history of Chinese film or its spin-off publications. Among the first generation of Chinese film actors, Yang Naimei has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention either, especially compared to the legendary Ruan Lingyu.¹ I argue that this disappearance reflects two acts of negligence, if not erasure, in Chinese film historiography: the negligence of the ‘queer woman’ (qi nüzi) vis-à-vis the canonical ‘new woman’ (xin nüxing),² and that of diasporic/Sinophone film spectatorship outside China proper.

The film’s English title was referred to as The Wonderful Girl (see Figures 1 and 4) or The Strange Flapper (Figure 3) in the press at the time, and film scholars have translated it as A Wondrous Woman or Extraordinary Girl (Wang 2011, 2; Chang 1999, 136). While the term qi nüzi contains more or less all the qualities suggested by these titles, I argue, it implies something more than being ‘wonderful’, ‘strange’, or ‘extraordinary’. Therefore, I propose ‘A Queer Woman’ as a conceptually more dynamic translation to capture the rich hermeneutic spaces the term qi nüzi opens up. Semantically, qi matches queer in its original sense: (of a person) peculiar, (of opinion and behaviour) at odds with others (OED, quoted in McCallum and Bradway 2019, 6), while the Chinese word alludes to unconventional or unusual qualities. Conceptually, I conceive queer broadly in terms of the gesture of defiance against normativity. There is no explicit evidence regarding Yu Meiyan’s (and Yang Naimei’s) homosexuality and bisexuality,³ but I understand their ‘queerness’ by embracing the slipperiness of the term, not restricting it to sexual orientation. In this sense, I echo Lauren Berlant (among others), who adopts a feminist expansion of the term ‘queer’ to investigate ‘the anomalous subject’ in a women’s melodrama (or what she terms ‘a queer melodrama’) (Berlant 2008, 169–205; quoted phrases at 202). More importantly, as I am proposing, the underexplored category of ‘queer woman’, existing both in and outside the film, may throw some light on problems embedded in the concept of ‘new woman’ in the historical context of 1920s China. Designed mainly by male intellectuals under China’s modernization project during the May Fourth era, the ‘new woman’ is an idealized female figure characterized chiefly by an independent spirit, education, and social conscience (Harris 1997, 287–288). Constructed against the stereotypes of ‘traditional’ Chinese womanhood, the ‘new woman’ can be construed as a projection of the male-centered May Fourth discourse of Chinese modernity. Thus, as Jin Feng argues, it ‘prescribed rather than described what it meant to be a modern Chinese woman’ by excluding ‘alternative discourses’ and ‘the voice of women as experiencing subjects’ (Feng 2004, 5). The ‘queer woman’, as I will demonstrate, is exactly what has been excluded, although the two arguably different types of woman shared imbricated trajectories in actual history. One goal of this article is to excavate the forgotten ‘queer woman’ and to inquire into the historical conditions that contributed to her omission.

Figure 1. Publicity still for A Queer Woman (1928). Source: Beiyang huabao 5, no. 246 (1928).

If the ‘new woman’ was positioned in the temporal/teleological structure of Chinese modernity, the ‘queer woman’ often functioned spatially across boundaries. Yang Naimei’s screening and performance tour in Nanyang illustrates this aspect and also points to the significance of the Nanyang film market in the geography of Shanghai cinema. The Nanyang region is normally conceived in wider terms, historically referring to a large area in Southeast Asia where Chinese immigrants lived from the fifteenth century onwards (Kuhn 2008). It was a lucrative market for the Shanghai film industry throughout the 1910s to the 1940s because of its economic strength under Western colonial rule and once can be seen as a solid audience base within what Shu-mei Shih defines as ‘Sinophone communities’ (Shih 2013). Existing on the margins of China and Chineseness, this film-going public has been undervalued in China-centered narratives of national film history. Charting the cultural exchanges of films, performances, and discourses between Shanghai and Nanyang, this article illuminates the complexities of screening and performing in these culturally interstitial spaces.

Drawing on a miscellany of texts—gossip, opinions, and voyeuristic images from the Shanghai and Nanyang-based Chinese language press, the first part of this article restores the storyline of the film A Queer Woman.⁴ By referencing the iconic 1935 film The New Woman (Xin nüxing) directed by Cai Chusheng (the assistant director of A Queer Woman), I consider the entwined biographies of the actress-producer Yang Naimei and the femme fatale Yu Meiyan—both quintessentially ‘queer women’, as well as the fictional ‘new woman’ Wei Ming (played by Ruan Lingyu). The second part tracks Yang’s film screening and performance tour in Nanyang, revealing the dynamic relationship between Yang’s Chineseness and the desires of Sinophone audiences. While the film is lost, I rely on textual and photographic evidence to effect a kind of ‘restoration’. Although the popular press certainly should not be taken as a reliable source of facts, it produces narratives from various perspectives that bring to light what is repressed or erased in historiographic practice.

The ‘Queer Woman’

Yang Naimei was born in 1904 into a wealthy Cantonese merchant family in Shanghai (K.K.K 1925). Yu Meiyan was about six years her senior, born in Taishan (in Guangdong) into a less illustrious family (Anonymous 1928a, 29). The fictional Wei Ming in The New Woman should be in her late twenties or early thirties, around the same age as Yang Naimei. The three women came of age against the same backdrop of tumultuous historical change in May Fourth China. The plot of A Queer Woman consists of several key acts, resonating with Wei Ming’s story and Yang Naimei’s biography.

Act 1 the girl student

As part of the socio-political reform package, the turn of the twentieth century saw the emergence of girls’ schools across China. A Queer Woman opens with Yu Meiyan’s role as a ‘girl student’ (nü xuesheng), an imagery carrying competing connotations. Facilitated by the institution of new education, Yu’s attractive body is not confined within the traditional inner chamber, but enters the public arena. On her way home from school, she is frequently followed by a stream of admirers, forming a ‘spectacle’. A scene in which she and her sweetheart amble along a river, comparable to ‘a pair of butterflies’, is eagerly gazed at by locals, spreading her name near and far. At the age of seventeen, her presence at a public sports event catches the heart of her future husband (Anonymous 1928a, 29, 42).⁵ Figure 1 shows the bodily aspects of this role performed by Yang Naimei. She wears an Indenthrene fabric qipao (a typical schoolgirl outfit at the time), her short bobbed hair reflects the latest fashion, and her body language demonstrates the May Fourth concept of ‘free love’ (ziyou lian’ai). These visual features are shared by a flashback scene in The New Woman, in which Wei Ming and her sweetheart are sitting under a tree in front of a Western-style college building (Figure 2). The actress Yang Naimei was likewise an eye-catching girl student: she attended several elite girls’ schools in Shanghai, which afforded her capital and courage to join the fledgling film industry (K.K.K. 1925; Zhang 1935, 10).

Figure 2. Frame enlargement. The New Woman (1935).

The life trajectories of the ‘new woman’ and the ‘queer woman’, I posit, overlap at this stage. When Hu Shih and his fellow May Fourth reformers introduced the concept of the ‘new woman’ from the West in the late 1910s, they emphasized that education was an essential prerequisite for women’s independence and agency (Harris 1997, 287). However, other social conditions constrained the girl student’s metamorphosis into an ideal ‘new woman’. First, Confucian moralists distained her ‘outlandish’ style at odds with traditional norms (Judge 2008, 114–22), as represented by Lu Xun’s character Siming in his 1924 short story ‘Feizao’ (Soap) (Lu [1924] 2009, 198):

Those women you see, parading along the street—they’ve no class at all. They even want to cut their hair off. Schoolgirls with bobs—now they are the limit. It’s not the warlords and bandits that’re the problem—it’s the women who’ve brought the country to its knees. They need to be taught a lesson they won’t forget.

Second, due to her visibility and desirability in public, the girl student was transformed into a commodity by print capitalism. The popular writer Zhou Shoujuan was a master in this realm. He created his dream lover known as Violet (Ziluolan), a girl student in mid-1910s Shanghai, as an emblem of modern romance for mass consumption, circulated through his autobiographies, short stories, magazines, and other forms in the popular cultural sphere (Chen 2019, 193–278). Yang Naimei’s imagery as a girl student was popularized in a similar vein after she became a film star (Anonymous 1932, 15):

On weekends and holidays, we could always see her dressed up glamorously, holding hands with a young man, a certain Zhang, roaming the city in their own car. We never failed to find the presence of this loving couple in the movie houses as well.

The corporeal styles of Yu Meiyan, Wei Ming, and Yang Naimei in their role of girl student mirror each other, attesting to the entangled relationship between the ‘new woman’ and the ‘queer woman’. As time goes by, the girl student enters the second act of her play, in which she often plays the role of Nora.

Act 2 Nora leaves home

Nora is a metonym for the ‘new woman’, introduced by Hu Shih in his translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the heat of the New Culture Movement in 1918. Afterwards, a legion of Chinese Noras leave home, in fiction, on stage, on screen, and in real life (Yang 2016, 294–96). Lu Xun then asked a seemingly unsympathetic question: ‘What happens after Nora leaves home?’ (Lu [1926] 1973) The crucial issue is that Nora is not born as an abstract ‘new woman’; she has to become a Nora. Therefore, what happens after Nora leaves home is no less significant than when she slams the door. Yu Meiyan is a representative Nora, but her acts after leaving home make her a ‘queer woman’, not a ‘new woman’.

Under patriarchal pressure, she marries the wealthy man bewitched by her beauty at the public sports event. However, shortly after their wedding, he leaves for the United States to attend the family business, leaving her in the traditional extended family, subject to regulatory rules and abuse by her sister-in-law. Suffering from the lack of freedom in marriage and a false legal accusation, Yu runs away and embarks on ‘a dissipated life as a qi nüzi’ (Anonymous 1928a, 42). This plotline features several classic ingredients of Chinese Nora tales: arranged marriage, oppressive family, yearning for freedom, and running away. Wei Ming in The New Woman is a slightly different version of Nora. In pursuit of May Fourth ‘free love’, she escapes from her own oppressive family, the patriarch of which demands that she kill herself after finding out that she was pregnant before the marriage. However, she is eventually discarded by the college sweetheart, leaving her as a victim of modern love. Yang Naimei the actress is yet another version of Nora. Yang’s first marriage was seemingly a result of ‘free love’: her husband was the certain Zhang, a wealthy businessman who went bankrupt after they married. Yang became a Nora by divorcing him, allegedly because he could not afford her luxurious lifestyle (Anonymous 1932).

Despite their different motives, the contours of the ‘new woman’ and the ‘queer woman’ still intertwine at this stage, driven by their agency in choosing to be a Nora. What happens after the three Noras leave home? Lu Xun’s satirical humour points out that without institutionalized means to guarantee women’s economic independence, Chinese Noras have nowhere to go except upstairs in their own homes. How do the three women sustain themselves financially? Their trajectories diverge at this point.

Act 3 the femme fatale vs. the prostitute

Yu Meiyan makes a living as a femme fatale. Her spectacular acts of ‘queerness’/qi spread through popular media after her suicide, on which the film was based. After running away, she is observed in Guangzhou, wearing outlandish clothes and behaving strangely. She lies naked in front of her hotel room, talking and laughing at ease, becoming a ‘strange spectacle’ (qiguan). Later, she is seen in Hong Kong and Shanghai, before starting a ten-year round-the-world tour, from Nanyang, Vietnam, Burma, India, to Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and elsewhere. She is warmly hosted everywhere she sojourns, and her glamorous appearances and irresistible charms captivate numerous people (Anonymous 1928a). A widely circulated rumour was that she had engaged in ‘(sexual) liaisons’ with over 3000 men (Qian 1928), and she was described as performing in an excessively unrestrained, transgressive manner on a transnational stage. Yang Naimei was renowned for her femme fatale status as well, status facilitated by an emerging Chinese star culture. Capitalizing on her sex appeal and celebrity status, the actress was portrayed as having ‘conquered’ bankers, military leaders, provincial warlords, and businessmen (Anonymous 1932).

The corporeal style of the two ‘queer women’ converges on screen. Consider Figures 3 and 4, publicity stills featuring Yang Naimei’s performance of Yu Meiyan as a femme fatale. Throwing lavish parties, she brings together a band of fashionable female socialites ­(Figure 3), and in turn she is surrounded by men willing to throw money at her (Figure 4). The exchange of gazes between Yu and her suitor is interesting: whilst his gaze is lascivious and pleading, hers is cold and dismissive. She sits tall and straight, whilst he is submissive. In other words, the visual language suggests that the femme fatale does not sell her body; it is the suitor who offers his cash for a taste of her body. This makes her different from the prostitute figure, whose profession is dubbed as ‘selling smiles’ (maixiao) in Chinese.

Figure 3. Publicity still for A Queer Woman. Source: Huabei huabao, no. 49 (1928).

Figure 4. Publicity still for A Queer Woman. Source: Beiyang huabao 5, no. 246 (1928).

Ruan Lingyu’s masterly performance in The New Woman perfectly depicts the act of ‘selling smiles’ as she portrays the time when Wei Ming is forced to become a prostitute (Figure 5). After leaving home, this Nora achieves financial independence as a respected music teacher and writer until her means of living is deprived because of her unwillingness to become the mistress of a powerful man, Dr Wang. Therefore, she qualifies as a true ‘new woman’ who has to be ‘a very good thinker and has very high morals’, according to Hu Shih’s definition (Harris 1997, 287). However, the cruel social reality does not allow such a ‘new woman’ to thrive. After several dramatic turns, she has no choice but to sell her body in order to save her daughter’s life. On the surface, the director Cai Chusheng portrays the ‘new woman’ in a sympathetic light, coding her body as a symbol of victomhood for a leftist critique of the darkness of society. This is an apt reading, but bringing in the femme fatale figure will shed light on a nuanced layer of gender politics. In addition to A Queer Woman, silent-era Shanghai films are not short of femme fatale characters who are often interpreted as a personification of Chinese modernity’s moral malady.⁶ Why is the ‘new woman’/prostitute combination glorified and the ‘queer woman’/femme fatale duo disparaged?

Let’s consider the canonical film Daybreak (Tianming, dir. Sun Yu, China, 1933) for a further inquiry into this matter. Daybreak features an innocent country girl (Lingling) coerced into becoming a prostitute after migrating to Shanghai. However, Lingling transforms herself into a disguised femme fatale deploying her resources to serve the grand cause of revolution, resulting in her execution as a martyr. Victor Fan argues that Lingling acts as a homo sacer. The concept from Giorgio Agamben stresses the severing (sacer) of an individual or a social group from a polis as a necessary condition for maintaining the imaginary consistency of the polis. At the same time, sacer means sacred, which, according to Fan, ‘thematises the imaginary poles of [Lingling’s] femininity: too noble (as a revolutionary martyr) and […] too filthy (as a sex worker) to be touched’ (Fan 2011, 234). Therefore, in order to maintain the imaginary consistency of Chinese national consciousness, Lingling has to become the homo sacer, and once severed, she can be ‘exchanged as a commodity or killed as an animal, with no pretence of sacrifice or redemption’ (ibid.). In other words, she becomes an empty signifier to be assigned with any ‘signifieds’ to serve different political purposes. In this sense, the sheer commodity value of the prostitute’s body makes her a malleable signifier. In contrast, as I am arguing, the enigmatic allure of the femme fatale is too slippery and ‘queer’ to be manipulated unless…she commits suicide (self-severed). Once self-severed, she instantly becomes the homo sacer, or, the ‘new woman’.

Act 4 The New Woman commits suicide

‘The New Woman Commits Suicide’, Bryna Goodman’s essay title, pinpoints a social phenomenon and a discourse around the failed ‘new woman’ in 1920s China. Contrary to the Confucian trope of virtuous female suicide (associated with chastity), the suicides of the ‘new women’ were circulated in the modern press as a mirror for contemplating ‘the morality of the new Republican order and the social and cultural changes associated with modernity’ (Goodman 2005, 68–69). In Haiyan Lee’s words, the ‘new women martyrs’ as constructed by May Fourth activists ‘lent urgency to the clarion call for radical change’ (Lee 2007, 142). This interpretative framework explains the abundance of the-new-woman-commits-suicide stories in early Chinese film history, culminating in the sensational film The New Woman, which was based on the real story of Ai Xia, a talented actress and screenwriter who committed suicide in 1934 (Harris 1997, 280). The melodramatic apex of the film is Wei Ming’s discovery that her client is none other than the Dr Wang. Broken in every sense, from the professional to the private, the humiliated and despairing Wei Ming commits suicide. A further layer of theatricality was added a few months later by the suicide of the actress Ruan Lingyu because of a marriage scandal fanned by the tabloid press. The real and the fictional merged, unleashing an outburst of intellectual commentary on the sufferings of the Chinese ‘new woman’ as ‘a silent and powerless victim of gossip and unjust persecution’ (Harris 1997, 295). With historical hindsight, A Queer Woman and Yu Meiyan’s suicide in 1928 were a predecessor of this kind of ‘trans-fictional’ representation. Yet, only the legacy of the suicide of the ‘new woman’ has been remembered. Why does the ‘queer woman’/femme fatale commit suicide? What makes her different from or similar to the ‘new woman’?

Having seen the world and savored the luxuries life has offered to her, Yu Meiyan often says, ‘there would be no regret even if I died immediately’ (Anonymous 1928a, 42). Yet, her passion is rekindled when she reunites with her first lover with whom she now wants to settle down. Figure 6 shows how she lovingly looks into his eyes, in contrast to her frosty gaze in the femme fatale’s role (Figure 4). Yet unsurprisingly, she cannot be accepted as a respectable wife, daughter-in-law, and future mother within the still prevailing Confucian regime of family. Having lost her desire to participate in worldly life, she converts to Buddhism, but even in the Buddhist temple her peace is disturbed due to visits from her previous suitors, causing her banishment from the temple. This results in her suicide through drowning in the sea during a cruise from Hong Kong to Shanghai at the age of 30 (Anonymous 1928a, 42). Figure 7 is allegedly the last photo of Yu (seated). Dressed stylishly, she poses for the camera in a performative posture, leaning into her friend. We are reminded of the image of her enjoying the company o female friends (Figure 3), but in her final photo the real Yu Meiyan looks sad and tired.

Figure 6. Publicity still for A Queer Woman. Source: Xin yinxing, no. 2 (1928).

Figure 7. Yu Meiyuan (left) with her friend. Source: Xin yinxing, no. 2 (1928).

Figure 5. Frame enlargement. Ruan Lingyu in The New Woman.

Suicide is the finale of Yu’s ‘queer’ performance. No visual evidence is available for us to picture how the film depicts this act. According to a journalistic reconstruction of her final hours, she talks to fellow passengers, laughing and weeping with little self-control, and that night she throws herself into the sea, leaving a letter to her lover and an open letter to ‘fellow women’ (Anonymous 1928a, 28). In the alleged open letter, she expresses the feelings of shame, guilt, and repentance for her ‘misused freedom’ and ‘debauched lifestyle’, though she points to ‘the society’ as the root cause (Yu 1928). The authenticity of the letter is hard to prove, though one wonders whether it is too ideal as a text for moral edification, one which could have been penned by any Confucian moralist equipped with a modern vocabulary.

As Goodman suggests, suicide was still ‘a site for the production of moral truth’ in the modern Republican era (69). Press coverage of Yu’s suicide attested to the complexity of the moral-political territory where the femme fatale, now the homo sacer, was open for an inquest. It is noteworthy that Cai Chusheng, only an aspiring freshman in the film world at that time, published an essay in a fan magazine, framing Yu’s suicide in the New Culture rhetoric (Cai 1928). While adopting the very term qi nüzi to describe Yu, he essentially fashioned her as a ‘new woman’, a fighter, and a victim, taking issue with widespread condemnation of her scandalous promiscuity:

How wronged Meiyan was! What a rare, remarkable ‘queer woman’ (qi nüzi) she was! I am not praising her conducts, but I found in her suicide note that what had compelled her to become a ‘queer woman’ was the outdated family system and evil society in our dark world. Her fight against the evil society reflected her brave soul and self-sacrifice, which deserve our acknowledgement.

Cai’s commentary illustrates Goodman’s argument that new-woman suicides became a public attraction because intellectual elites ‘invested these images with particular social aspirations and social critiques’ (70). Suicide personified ‘an ideal of self-sacrifice and self-willed martyrdom’ which had been implanted into ‘the core of the new Chinese woman’ (77). In other words, Cai envisaged Yu Meiyan as Lingling, the self-willed femme fatale-cum-revolutionary martyr in Daybreak, ‘transforming’ Yu into a homo sacer to maintain the consistency of the imaginary moral and political entity of China.

In reality, this entity was hardly consistent. Juxtaposed with Cai’s impassioned essay was a short vignette in which the author ‘lamented’ over Yu’s exquisite feet, which allegedly had been insured for $50,000 by Yu herself, and now became the expensive dish of a ‘queer fish’ (Lang 1928). Redolent of the ‘perverted’ tradition of foot fetishism, this frivolous remark unsettled the assumed coherence of Cai’s vision. The ‘old-school’ writer Zhu Shouju cast Yu in yet another light, claiming that her qi/‘queerness’ lay in her unorthodox style, daring to act in defiance against social norms. Therefore, she could be aligned with a school of legendary social outcasts in Chinese folk tradition (Zhu 1928).

Yu Meiyan is probably all of these, and none of these. She embodies the ‘queer woman’, a slippery signifier, the meaning of which can only be acquired through her own contradictory actions. Like the fictional character Wei Ming, Yu likewise suffers from ‘traditional constraints on women and the mistreatment of women in mass media and urban society’ (Harris 1997, 280), but her path parts from Wei’s by her means of capitalizing on modernity and urban society. While Wei’s suicide is directly caused by financial and moral conundrums, Yu’s suicide is more about relinquishing worldly existence in the Buddhist sense. Therefore, the ‘queer woman’ disrupted the consistency of the imagined moral-political entity Cai Chusheng and his fellow intellectuals aspired to create, leading to the inevitable erasure of her in official historical writings after the establishment of the PRC.

Yang Naimei never attempted to kill herself, though her suicide was repeatedly ‘anticipated’ by the tabloid press when she reportedly faced lawsuits, bankruptcies, and heartbreak (Zhuang 1930; Shentan 1931). Making a film about Yu Meiyan and performing as the fictionalized Yu, she was understood as wishing ‘to articulate her own supressed feelings’ because she was likewise a qi nüzi, in Zhu Shouju’s words (Zhu 1928).⁷ To a degree, then, Yang was performing herself, or the ‘queer woman’ at large. While refusing to submit to the fate of the homo sacer, she had to strive to survive in the oppressive environment of Shanghai urban society. Performing between Shanghai and Nanyang became a strategy, and in so doing she engaged with a heterogeneous Sinophone space, a space itself marginalized in the national history of Chinese cinema.

Touring Nanyang

In Chinese film history, Nanyang assumes two contradictory images: a coveted market and a backward Other (Cheng et al. [1963] 1981, 86–90, 131–136). As a lucrative market, Chinese film distribution and exhibition networks grew rapidly from the mid-1920s on, especially in major cities such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Yangon (Chua 2015; Fu 2008). For the Shanghai film industry, the Nanyang film market comprised five regions: the Straits Settlements (under British rule, Singapore and Malaysia today), the Dutch settlements (chiefly Indonesia), the Philippines (under American rule), Vietnam (under French authority), and Thailand (Huang 2014, 277). As a backward Other, according to Zheng Junli’s influential writing in 1936 about Chinese film history, the Nanyang film market was a ‘colonial enterprise’ and Shanghai films attracted its Chinese immigrant populations who led ‘a medieval style of life’ attached to their homelands (Zheng [1936] 1996, 1408–9). This narrative framed Nanyang as a dual Other, associated with China’s ‘feudal’ past as well as Western colonialism. At the same time, the inclusion of Nanyang in Zheng’s ‘brief history of modern Chinese film’ implies a sense of ‘ownership’, echoing the widespread Chinese understanding of Nanyang as a diasporic branch of the solid cultural entity of Chineseness (Kuhn 2008, 245–46). Against this backdrop Yang Naimei embarked on her screening and performance tour, following business patterns of Chinese itinerant troupes that had been evolving within a thriving transnational theatrical network in Nanyang since the early twentieth century (Zhang 2021, 19–103). How did she present her ‘queer woman’ on- and -off screen in this interstitial space? How were strategies of representation or empowerment formulated in the competing claims of Chinese nationalism, Western colonialism, and Sinophone hybridity?

On February 18, 1929, Nanyang Siang Pau (hereafter NYSP), a Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper, reported that Yang Naimei had arrived in Singapore and had hosted a banquet on behalf of her film company (Anonymous 1929a). Shortly afterwards, the Chinese-run Marlborough Theater screened A Queer Woman alongside a live show including Chinese traditional dance and Cantonese opera singing performed by Yang and her two sisters (Anonymous 1929d; Mu 1929). In the following months she toured Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and the Dutch colony (Anonymous 1929c). Sporadic news about her whereabouts can be found in NYSP throughout her two-and-half-year sojourn. For example, after a film screening she and her sisters performed tangos, Egyptian belly dances, Chinese songs, and a certain ‘Parisian dance’ displaying their ‘sensual beauty and alluring curves’ (rougan mei, quxian mei) (Anonymous 1930). She also volunteered to act in a play in the modern xinju (New Drama) style to support a local troupe (Anonymous 1929b).

To summarize, accompanying the screening of A Queer Woman was a multicultural repertoire of shows, comprising four types of performance: traditional Chinese opera, exotic and erotic dance, xinju or huaju (Spoken Drama), and singing. Together, these shows constituted a performative ‘heteroglossia’, speaking the disparate languages of Chinese tradition, Western popular culture, and Chinese May Fourth modernity. In other words, this apparently authentic Chinese female body provided the Nanyang Sinophone community with anything but a monolithic ‘Chineseness’. Responding to the hybrid taste and desires of this community, Yang Naimei the actress converged with her on-screen alter ego, the ‘queer woman’, and empowered herself through intuitive acts of translation and transaction. In the following, I will investigate her strategies, formulated by means of her engagement with two intertwined regimes: race and nation; gender and sexuality. In so doing, I address the aforementioned double amnesia in Chinese film history, bringing to light both the ‘queer woman’ character and the Nanyang film market as important components of this history.

Race and nation

Race was a tricky matter for Sinophone communities in colonial-era Nanyang. Despite their culturally and demographically strong presence, they were juridically subject to Western colonial rule and had to grapple with competing power relations and ambivalent ethnic identities. Yang Naimei’s performative body instinctively engaged with these issues to satisfy mixed desires of the Sinophone audience. To be specific, first, her Cantonese opera performances addressed the problem of root, i.e. Chineseness, a pivotal dimension in the discourse of huaqiao (overseas Chinese), though in May Fourth intellectual Zheng Junli’s narrative, this taste represented ‘a medieval style of life’ (1408–9).

Second, Yang supplied a corrective act by exhibiting the modern body of Chineseness in her huaju dramas. The themes she selected are quintessentially ‘May Fourth’, such as the child-bride system, a theme one also finds in Shen Congwen’s canonical story Xiaoxiao (1929) (Kaimola 1931; Hua 1931). This modern body had been visually displayed and interpreted in her performance of Yu Meiyan the girl student (Figure 1) as well as in the role of Yunqian, another quintessential girl student played by Yang in the 1924 film Jade Pear Spirit (Yuli hun, dir. Zhang Shichuan, China), a film that was screened in Nanyang as well (Huang 2014, 200–211).

Third, juxtaposed with performing Chineseness was an exotic display of ‘sensual beauty and alluring curves’ in her ‘Parisian dance’ (Bali yewu), bringing the vicarious pleasure expected in a French cabaret. She offered the Nanyang Chinese a comfortable, ‘domestic’ substitute (i.e. her own body) for the alien European body associated with colonial power. Here, Yang’s tactic relied not on authenticity, but on mimicry. If we agree with Homi Bhabha’s theorization of mimicry as the colonizer’s ‘desire for a reformed, recognizable Other’ for effective colonial rule (Bhabha 2004, 122), Yang’s performance of Parisianness seems to point to the reverse of the argument, suggesting a kind of desire of the colonized (the Nanyang audience) for a reformed, recognizable Self as their own strategy of identity in colonial space. After all, it was a Parisian dance, but not quite, since it was the recognizable Chinese body who was performing. In this sense, this performative ‘mimicry’ was essentially a translation, transforming otherness into something legible and more likable.

Fourth, Yang’s performances of Latin American tango and Egyptian belly dance, i.e. cultural forms appropriated from the colonized subjects of Western colonialism, further complicated her translation of otherness, producing different types of gratification. Relishing Yang’s reincarnation of the ‘colonized’ body, might the Nanyang Chinese derive a mimetic pleasure akin to one that Europeans might gain from viewing an exotic burlesque show of their colonized Other? Or, might the Sinophone audience develop a brotherly warm feeling towards Yang’s corporeal translation of their colonized equals? There was presumably no definite answer; ambivalence and ambiguity are often inscribed in culturally interstitial zones. Engaging with the ‘interstitiality’, I propose, was exactly how the ‘queer woman’ empowered herself.

Furthermore, Yang’s empowerment derived from her ingenious deployment of economic and symbolic capital. In contrast to the ‘new woman’ characters whose downfall was often linked to financial woes (among others), Yang Naimei’s image as a gold digger was firmly established in the popular press. It was reported that in her early years of stardom, she diligently learned traditional opera singing and foreign dances for ‘money’ (Xiao 1925; Shen 1926), and reports about her performance tours across China were plenteous (Zhou 1926; Anonymous 1926). Money was apparently her motivation to tour Nanyang and her financial gains must have been lucrative. However, these stories do not take account of her charitable giving and her patriotism. Her strategy involved a two-way transaction of economic and symbolic capital that was interlinked with the issue of the Chinese nation and her diasporic ties.

When screening A Queer Woman in Singapore, Yang donated part of her income to famine victims in Shandong Province in China (Anonymous 1929d; Mu 1929). This fund was swiftly remitted to the Chinese government, as evidenced by a news report in Zhongyang ribao (Central Daily), the Nationalist Party’s official organ (Anonymous 1929e). Beside Yang’s donation, the report mentioned the receipt of famine relief from a Yangon huaqiao (overseas Chinese) organization. This juxtaposition is interesting in that Yang’s benevolent act was officially acknowledged within a discourse that centered on the kinship between the Chinese diaspora and motherland China. The generosity of huaqiao who supported their motherland for revolutionary, nationalistic, and other causes from the late Qing to the Mao era is well-known. By embracing huaqiao nationalism, exchanging economic capital for symbolic capital might even have boosted her takings. Thus, it is clear that Yang was not the ‘new woman’ economically and bodily victimized by society; rather, she was the empowered ‘queer woman’, dancing with the discourses of race and nation between Shanghai and Nanyang.

Gender and sexuality

At the heart of the stories of our two ‘queer women’ is their sexual divergence from both Confucian and May Fourth norms of femininity. Nanyang afforded them a stage to perform another dimension of sexual transgression, one that related to race. An unusual facet of Yu Meiyan’s ‘queerness’, as pointed out by a Tianjin-based newspaper, was her ‘being ravaged (cuican) by men of many different races, or one may argue, being able to manipulate (runong) men around the world’. Thus, this author characterized Yu’s sojourns abroad as ‘animal-like amorous adventures’ (Zhuang 1930). The Sinophone audiences of Yu’s story on-screen seemingly shared these views from China, regarding Yu as ‘lustful and shameless’ as they did (Anonymous 1929d). The regulation of female sexuality is a common feature of patriarchal gender politics; yet in the rising discourse of nationalism, sleeping with men of other races also needed to be kept in check. Racialized moral accusations of Yu’s licentiousness thus functioned to legitimize male fetishistic desires. How Yu and Yang played with these desires warrants closer scrutiny.

Freud construes the fetish as ‘an artificial repository of the sexuality that a so-called civilized society cannot afford to admit to be its own and must divert elsewhere’, comprised of ‘the twin psychic processes of disavowal and displacement of unmentionable desires’ (Chow 2007, 211). Rey Chow applies this concept to analyze the prostitute figure in The Goddess (Shennü, dir. Wu Yonggang, China, 1934) by virtue of ‘her embodiment of forbidden desires that holds fascination for modern spectators’ (ibid.). Following this line of argument, Yu and Yang are classic fetish objects as well, fascinating the Nanyang audience because of the forbidden desires not only for unrestrained sexual pleasure but also for implied interracial sexual liaisons. Taken together with Yang’s exotic dances, it is evident that racialized sexuality or sexualized race was what Yang intuitively sold in Nanyang, as both attraction and abjection, allure and taboo. Through a reading of the huaqiao position as one of ambivalence, the ‘queer woman’ empowered herself by fetishizing herself.

A similar dynamic played out in Yang Naimei’s off-screen, off-stage sexual performance. Unsurprisingly, there was no shortage of moral accusation of Yang as a performer of erotic dances. As Figure 8 shows, costumed in an alluring dress, she is dancing provocatively on an Art Deco stage set. According to a report in the Singaporean newspaper NYSP, some men distained her ‘ghost-like, disgusting’ eroticism and some even splashed asphalt on her body as she travelled to a theater (Anonymous 1931a). A juicier subject was Yang’s relationship with a young man known as You Guanren, her alleged ‘sworn brother’ (yidi), who performed with her in these touring shows. Their private, off-stage ‘performances’ were denounced by the press too. In an eye-catching article entitled ‘Yang Naimei Sleeps with Her Brother’, a journalist offered a reportedly ‘eyewitness account’ of their intimate activities in a hotel room in Ipoh when he stayed next door. The journalist mocked You’s ‘sworn brother’ status, suggesting that his handsome, sissy looks (xiao bailian) made him a perfect ‘male concubine’ (nanqie) (Anonymous 1931b). Whereas a modern nationalistic patriarch might abhor Yu Meiyan’s interracial promiscuity, a Confucian patriarch would condemn Yang Naimei’s transgressive act of taking a ‘male concubine’. The Sinophone film audiences seemed to have found a way to straddle or accommodate both positions, and all these aberrant acts needed to be cursed first in order to be savored as the fetish.

Figure 8. Publicity still for A Queer Woman (a visual clue of Yang’s dance during her Nanyang shows). Source: Shanghai manhua, no. 25 (1928): 3.

Negotiating with and capitalizing on the ambivalence of the Nanyang audience, Yang Neimei epitomized what I am calling the ‘queer woman’. While the ‘new woman’ on-screen may be discarded by men, reduced to poverty, and even descend into the evil of prostitution or concubinage, the ‘queer woman’ performs sexual emancipation, reverses gender roles, and subverts race and gender norms. That is what I read from the contemporary on- and off-screen tales of Yu Meiyan and Yang Naimei. There is no doubt about the immeasurable significance of the ‘new woman’ ideal that was invented, popularized, and debated in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s; and yet at the time of China’s national crisis, she tended to be constrained by masculinist and nationalist discourses. Excavating the ‘queer woman’ from the ruins of silent-era Shanghai cinema, this article brings to light an alternative type of modern femininity, adding nuance to our understanding of women’s roles, on as well as off screen, in early Chinese film industry. The short-lived Nai-Mei Pictures Co. as the first film company founded by a woman in China deserves serious scholarly consideration. My study also looks into the underexplored Nanyang film market, calling into question claims regarding the homogeneous Chineseness of the Sinophone film-going public. The very popularity of Yang Naimei’s multicultural performance and translation suggests the hybridity of this community. Yet Yang Naimei was not the only Shanghai star who toured in Nanyang. A legion of performers ventured into this complex, exciting contact zone during the Republican era.⁸ Both the ‘queer woman’ and the Sinophone reception of Chinese cinema warrant more scholarly attention beyond the established frames of Chinese film historiography.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof Jane Gaines for her enthusiasm about Yang Naimei’s story I presented in this study and for her perceptive comments and editorial suggestions. The feedback from an anonymous reader was also most helpful. Assistance from the editorial team, especially Pan Xiaoyang, is deeply appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Xuelei Huang

Xuelei Huang is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell (Cambridge, 2023), Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (Routledge, 2022). She has published essays on Chinese film and cultural history in Modern Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Twentieth-century China, and other academic journals. She has co-curated Chinese film programmes for the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in Scotland and Edinburgh Filmhouse.

Notes

1 For a biography of Yang Naimei, see Wei (2018); for studies that touch upon Yang, see Chang (1999), Zhang (2002), Wang (2011). For a recent journal article, see Wei 2023.

2 The two terms appear in singular form and quotation marks consistently in this article, denoting qi nüzi and xin nüxing, respectively, as two types of woman discussed in contemporary contexts. My usage of ‘queer’ is equivalent to the Chinese word qi, differing from the present-day common usage of ‘queer’ in sexual terms.

3 There is a hint of homosexual love in a photo of Yu and her ‘female friend’ (nüyou, Figure 7). In terms of Yang, according to the fan magazines, she and another female star Xuan Jinglin were best friends and Xuan sometimes stayed overnight at Yang’s. But there was no explicit reference to a potential homosexual relationship.

4 The narrative of A Queer Woman can be pieced together from three texts: a journalistic essay about the film published in Tianjin North China Pictorial (Jue 1928), the lyric of ‘The Queer Woman’s Song of Confession’ sung by Yang Naimei in her pre-screening live performances (Song and Feng 1928), and a biography of Yu Meiyan published shortly after her suicide (Anonymous 1928a). A handful of publicity stills accompanying these texts are the only visual vestiges of the film.

5 Since the line between biography and fiction is blurry in Yu Meiyan’s story pieced together here, I use present tense consistently to indicate the semi-fictional semi-biographical feature of the narrative.

6 For example, Oceans of Passion, Heavy Kissing (Qinghai chongwen, dir. Xie Yunqing, China, 1928), Pink Dream (Fenhongse de meng, dir. Cai Chusheng, China, 1932) and many others.

7 It was said that Yang and Yu were friends (Qian 1928).

8 For example, Yang’s contemporary film star Wang Hanlun (Xiao 1929); a Shanghai-based dancer called Miss Violet (Ziluolan nüshi, see Liangyou 21, 1927: 30); and another film star Wang Ying (Anonymous 1940a). For a study of the Nanyang tour of a Shanghai dance troupe, see Zhang (2021, 64–83).