The story of Begonia is, in fact, somewhat convoluted. After their love affair is
discovered by the warlord, reluctantly separating from his lover and moving to countryside with his daughter, Begonia encounters tremendous hardships, including betrayal, sickness, poverty, the abduction of his daughter, national/natural disasters and finally, death. The film version is so long (running time: 3 hours 22 minutes) that it was divided into two parts when screening: the first part is about Begonia and Luo Xiangqi’s love story and the second part starts when Begonia is forced to leave Xiangqi for good to raise their daughter Meibao 梅寶 singlehandedly. This division is, from hindsight, accurate in terms of genre conventions: when the first part is a romantic melodrama which is articulated via the depictions of victimhood, the second part could be regarded as a domestic melodrama focusing on father and daughter’s love and their
sufferings.27 How is a romantic story told by interweaving the narrative of victimhood? How are the discourses of love, articulated in melodramatic mode, formulated to locate the moral occult in the war?
26 Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Chocies in Occupied
Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), xvi; Li, Wenching, Gongrong de xiangxiang: diguo, zhimingdi yu Da Dongya wenxue quan (Taipei: Daoxiang, 2010), 455.
27 While she did point out that the second part of Begonia is a “family melodrama” (ファミリー メロドラマ), Gotô Noriko failed to define what “family melodrama” means and how this mode engages with the wartime environment. Gotô Noriko, “Eizô sakka Ma-Xu Weibang to Shûkaidô nikansuru ichi kôsatsu,” 24.
1. Love in Victimhood
(1) Moralizing Victimhood
The moral messages in the melodramatic mode are, as mentioned above, exemplified by Manichaean polarization of good versus evil. Virtue and villainy inevitably clash in the narrative so as to emphasize and elevate the moral altitude of the good. The confrontation of virtue and villainy is often personified in the triad of hero, heroine and villain in melodramatic narrative. While the virtuous, innocent hero and heroine are portrayed as powerless victims and often “belong to a democratic universe,” the villains are frequently “tyrants and oppressors, those that have power and use it to hurt” and from a “noble” or higher social status.28 The victims in melodrama are endowed with the most moral authority because of their sufferings.29 Christine Gledhill, when studying the history of European melodrama, claims that melodrama, which emerged in the post-Revolution society, has a nostalgic structure. Instead of looking forward to a revolutionary future, it seeks to return to a “golden past;” instead of sympathizing with struggles of bourgeois ascendency, it pities the victims of its success.30 The powerless thus regain moral power in the sociopolitical chaos and moral confusion. Despite the sociopolitical differences between post-Revolution Europe and wartime Shanghai, such is also the case in the story of
Begonia, in which morality is devastated by national crisis. The hero, Begonia, and the heroine,
Xiangqi, are obviously the incarnation of virtue because of their sufferings, whereas Warlord Yuan, Xiangqi’s tyrannical, oppressive and powerful husband, is the embodiment of evil. The villainy of Warlord Yuan is demonstrated by his lascivious behavior of lusting after both the heroine and the hero.
28 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 44; Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” 17. 29 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and
Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), 43.
Xiangqi’s is a story of forced and love-less marriage. When she is delivering a speech at the commencement ceremony at Girls’ Normal School in Tianjin, Warlord Yuan, who attends this event only for “seeing girl students,” immediately becomes infatuated with her. With some help from the matchmaker, the principal of the Girls’ Normal School, he deceives Xiangqi and takes her as his third concubine. The go-between convinces Xiangqi that Warlord Yuan is in his early 30s, still single, and has a decent appearance (by showing his nephew’s photo to Xiangqi), even though none of these is true. Desperate for cash in order to save her sick brother, Xiangqi reluctantly marries him. After realizing the Warlord’s true identity, she regrets that her body is “defiled” by him, but her heart remains as “pure” as ever.31 Xiangqi’s story of forced marriage between warlord and concubine is quite typical in the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies genre, such as the story of the singsong girl Fengxi and General Liu in Zhang Henshui’s 張恨水 (1897- 1967) Tixiao yinyuan 啼笑因緣 (Fate in tears and laughter, 1930). Republican women, the symbol of powerlessness, are often victims of political and economic power, while the power is personified by warlords and manifested in sexual aggression.32 What is unusual (and hence more despicable) in Warlord Yuan’s lasciviousness, however, is his lust for Begonia, a female
impersonator in Beijing opera.33
Begonia is described as a timid, delicate, and extremely beautiful boy who was sent to the theater troupe by his mother due to poverty. Because of his beauty and refined demeanor, he was assigned to learn the female part in an all-male troupe and was given the stage name Wu Yuqin 吳玉琴, a feminine name literally means jade zither. (He later changes his stage name to
31 Qin Shouou, “Qiuhaitang,” Shenbao, March 27, 1941.
32 About the villain’s social and political power and sexual aggression, see Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 45.
33 Male homosexual desire seem to be a conventional way to depict the villainy in warlords and upper-class men in the stories about republican era. Recent examples see the novel and film adaptation of Bawang beiji (Farewell My Concubine, 1991).
Begonia. See below.) When seeing him singing a female role on stage, Warlord Yuan, from balcony in the film version, looks at Yuqin with a lecherous gleam in his eye and an unruly grin. The voyeuristic gaze makes our timid hero extremely uncomfortable, yet he has to endure more humiliations in the following years. Warlord Yuan notifies the boss of the troupe that he would like to “make friends” with Yuqin and give every student in the troupe a luxury fur hat as a gift (in order to get the chance to touch his new prey). When Warlord Yuan is finally approaching him with the hat, Yuqin’s body trembles and his hands are as cold as ice. He lowers his head in order to avoid “the eyes more poisonous than serpent” but to no avail. Warlord Yuan eventually uses his fat and coarse “cactus-like” hands to holds Yuqin’s icy hands, lifts his chin and laughs wildly, “You are such a shy boy!”34 Enraged, Liu Yuhua 劉玉華, one of Yuqin’s sworn brothers, attacks Warlord Yuan with bare hands. The situation goes from bad to worse: Warlord Yuan furiously takes out his handgun and aims at Yuhua. Yuqin can no longer endure the shock and suddenly passes out. In the film version, Warlord Yuan then forgets the confrontation; the camera zooms in to his salacious eyes leering at Yuqin’s helpless body lying on the floor unconsciously with a wicked smile. (Figure 4.1, 4.2) The homosexual erotic gaze threatens Yuqin’s masculinity— in other words, the Warlord’s facial expression implies his desire toward Yuqin and let female impersonator feels he is sexually offended but couldn’t resist; it is an imaginary rape. While rape is a common form of victimization (of the female characters) in melodrama, sexual assault is not a usual means to inflict harm on the hero. Thus a contemporary critic comments that Begonia is a drama of perversion and social problems, in which not only “real” women are humiliated; men whose occupation are impersonating woman are also subject
to humiliation.35 In light of this observation, the villainy personified by Warlord Yuan is not merely lust on personal level; it is indeed a social evil of injustice in terms of power structure and gender inequality.36
To add one more layer of the social evil, the spoken drama version of Begonia
emphasizes yet another sin of Warlord Yuan: unpatriotic behavior. While Warlord Yuan in the novel is primarily depicted as lustful and unlawful (he even considers that he himself is the law),37 in the spoken drama he is both lascivious and ignorant of his duty as a military leader: he indulges in personal desire and cares nothing about the nation, the politics and the public. When being reminded that there will be a meeting in the Presidential Office, he insists on staying in Begonia’s dressing room in the backstage of the Beijing opera house and complains, “Those damn official duties! They give me no freedom at all!”38 He does not realize that he (and other warlords) have the political responsibility to save China from crisis. Gôto Noriko contends that the character Warlord Yuan symbolizes the Japanese Army, because the uniform of warlords in China was similar to that of the Japanese Army whose presence was everywhere in wartime Shanghai.39 However, considering the fact that warlord is a common trope in Republican popular literature and not merely a wartime phenomenon, I would rather suggest that the image of
warlord does not represent specifically the Japanese invasion, but more generally the political chaos caused by unpatriotic action. The national crisis which causes the collapse of morality and the sufferings of the virtuous hero and heroine in Begonia, thus, is the factional warfare and
35 “Juping Qiuhaitang,” Taiping 6 (1943), 10.
36 Huang Wangli considers that Begonia’s ill fate is not really about fate but about the oppression by social injustice represented by Warlord Yuan and his henchmen. See Huang Wangli,
“Bianrong, fenglie, shengsi: Ma-Xu Weibang yingpian de xushi tesi—chongdu Qiu Haitang,”
Dangdai tianying (2006 vol. 1): 87.
37 Qin Shouou, “Qiuhaitang,” Shenbao, January 16, 1941. 38 Qin Shouou, Qiuhaitang juben, 27.
corruption in domestic political sphere, while, not explicitly mentioned in the literary, theatrical and film narratives but contemporary readers and spectators would detect that the domestic political chaos further incites foreign invasion. In sum, Begonia and Xiangqi are both victims of the political repression signified as sexual victimization especially in the spoken drama rendition of the story.
(2) Romantic Love in Victimhood
The victimhood in Begonia in fact instigates the romantic love between the hero and the heroine, albeit it is formulated somewhat differently in the novel, film and spoken drama renditions respectively. In the original novel, it is sympathy between victims that generates the feeling of romantic love. The hero and the heroine had never met until another of Begonia’s sworn brothers Zhao Yukun 趙玉昆 beats a opera house manager almost to death because the manager implies that Begonia and Warlord Yuan’s nephew have an homosexual affair. Yukun is arrested by police and Begonia rushes to Warlord Yuan’s residence for help, only to find that the third concubine, Xiangqi, is as beautiful, solemn and pure as “a lotus bud dedicated to the
Buddha.”40 Begonia soon knows every detail about Xiangqi’s forced marriage and feels “pity and rage” about the Warlord’s deception and humiliation of her.41 Xiangqi feels the same way when Begonia confesses that being a female impersonator is like a puppet, even though it makes him famous and rich.42 They feel like they share the same fate and soon fall in love. In other words, sympathy generates the sense of intimacy from the hearts of the two victims. In the film version romantic love is derived from sympathy, too, but with a slight twist. Begonia first meets
40 Qin Shouou, “Qiuhaitang,” Shenbao, February 12, 1941. 41 Qin Shouou, “Qiuhaitang,” Shenbao, March 27, 1941. 42 Qin Shouou, “Qiuhaitang,” Shenbao, March 12, 1941.
Xiangqi not in Warlord Yuan’s residence, but in the commencement ceremony at Girls’ Normal School. In the film Begonia accompanies Warlord Yuan to the ceremony and witnesses how the Warlord casts licentious gaze at Xiangqi when she speaks about the importance of cultivating independence in order to serve the society, the nation and the country. The film cross-cuts between Warlord Yuan’s salacious eyes, Begonia’s worrying face, and a point-of-view shot of the Warlord tilting from Xiangqi’s feet up to her face when she is standing on the podium delivering speech. Begonia feels affection for Xiangqi because on the one hand he sympathizes with Xiangqi’s impending victimhood; on the other hand, he also admires the courage and determination demonstrated in her speech. Thus in the film version Begonia falls in love with Xiangqi not only because they share similar victimhood, but more importantly because he sees in her something lacking in his personality. Their union is morally innocent in that they unite through the romantic emotion of love based on the feelings of pity and admiration of character, rather than through sexuality or vanity.43 Even though they do consummate their love and give birth to a daughter, and some contemporary critics did consider that the love story is
adulterous,44 Begonia and Xiangqi’s love still qualifies as virtuous in the conventions of melodramatic narrative.
The spoken drama has yet a different way to legitimize the romantic love and to
conceptualize the gender dynamics between them. The hero and heroine first meet when Warlord Yuan coerces Xiangqi, who is already his concubine, to talk with Begonia in his dressing room backstage. Xiangqi at first despises Begonia because a female impersonator is one of the lowest of the low in Chinese social and moral hierarchy, even though the concubine is another (both due
43 About union through love instead of sexuality, see Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,”
Screen 27/6 (November-December 1986):13.
to their “improper” sexuality that cannot be properly situated in Confucian family structure). Warlord Yuan intends to tease both the heroine and the hero by asking him to explain why his stage name is Begonia, because “Xiangqi wants to know.”45 Inasmuch as the leaf of begonia resembles the shape of China’s map, Begonia answers, he would like to use it as a symbol, first, to remind the actors in traditional Chinese theater that they are also citizens of Republic of China and have a responsibility to the country and the nation, and second, to let the populace know that even though they are the lowest of the low, the traditional theater actors do not forget their nation and deserve to be treated equally.46 The outburst of patriotism and nationalism in his speech, while derided by the Warlord, inspires Xiangqi to reflect on the injustice in Chinese society, especially women’s sufferings. They find zhiji 知己 (intimate friends with mutual understanding) in each other and soon fall in love. In other words, their mutual affection is derived from both the sympathy of sufferings on personal level as well as the resentment of the injustice on social and national levels.
In the script of the spoken drama written in Chongqing after Qin Shouou fled Occupied Shanghai, the author even maintains that Begonia and Xiangqi’s love is less about romantic passion but more about “anger against the common enemy” (tongchou dikai 同仇敵慨) and their union is to join forces in order to resist the evil.47 The sentiments of cooperation, resistance and revolt do not exist in the novel and film versions of Begonia, however. These remarks in spoken drama script, may thus be regarded as Qin Shouou’s re-interpretation of the story in the
hinterland. Nevertheless, we cannot exclude the potential to read the love story in this way in wartime Shanghai. In short, the union of Begonia and Xiangqi in the spoken drama version is
45 Qin Shouou, Qiuhaitang juben, 21. 46 Ibid, 22.
based on kindred spirit and patriotic passion rather than on sexuality and thus is also morally good, similarly to that in the original novel and film adaptation.
(3) Union of Motherly Love
Tthe penchant for depicting the union of couple through love (instead of sex) in
melodrama is further considered as a “nostalgic fantasy of childhood characterized by union with the mother: a state of total love, satisfaction, and dyadic fusion.”48 To elaborate on this
observation, romantic love in melodrama could be regarded as originating from a regressive desire to return to the pure, unconditional and complete union of mother and child in the pre- Oedipal stage when the infant’s pleasure derives from the intimacy of sucking mother’s breasts in total dependence. In light of this, we should further analyze the love between Begonia and Xiangqi vis-à-vis the trope of the Mother. Before investigating their relationship with regard to the motherly figure, however, we should probe into the mother-son complex from Begonia’s perspective.
First, Begonia’s changing his stage name is related to his longing for his mother. Begonia changes the feminine Wu Yuqin to the more gender neutral Begonia, as many scholars point out, because of the patriotic association of the plant and the country.49 The catalyst of the name change, on the surface, is because he wants to diminish the femininity implied in the original stage name in order to resume his manliness and to symbolically protest Warlord Yuan’s
48 Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 17.
49 See Gotô Noriko, “Eizô sakka Ma-Xu Weibang to Shûkaidô nikansuru ichi kôsatsu,” 24. Gotô’s target of research is the film version of Begonia. She claims that the metaphor of begonia leaf in Maxu Weibang’s film inherits the symbolism of begonia in Fei Mu’s short feature An
Interrupted Dream in a Spring Chamber (Chungui mengduan 春閨夢斷), one of the eight
episodes of the omnibus work Symphony of Lianhua (Lianhua jiaoxiang qu 聯華交響曲, 1937). I would rather suggest that the begonia leaf as symbol of China is a common trope in Republican China, as the fiction narrative of Begonia demonstrates.
sexual aggression, as Mau-Sang Ng maintains in his study on the novel of Begonia.50 Upon closer investigation, however, the correlation between his name change and his mother’s death seems to suggest a different interpretation. In the novel, Begonia is portrayed as a filial son who becomes a female impersonator solely because it is the only means to make money and support his poverty-stricken widowed mother. He often misses his mother who lives in the countryside when learning and performing in the troupe in Beijing and has an infantile dependence on the image of Mother who is always absent from his real life. Whenever he is mentally beaten up by the humiliation of being feminized by patrons and other students in the troupe, he thinks of his mother and feels like he regains courage and can endure the hardships again. When his mother finally died, Begonia could not stand the sorrow and asks Warlord Yuan’s nephew Yuan
Shaowen 袁紹文, the only good and intelligent guy in the Warlord’s circle, to come to talk with him, not about his beloved late mother, but rather, with an interesting twist, about the national crisis in China. After listening to Shaowen’s analogy of China as begonia leaf and the foreign invaders as the leaf-eating worms, he decides to switch his stage name.51 In other words, his