Imagined Chineseness in Feng Xiao Gang’s New Year
Comedies
Master Thesis June 21st, 2013
Graduate School of Humanities rMA Program: Media Studies Supervisor: Jeroen de Kloet
Student: Xiaoquan Bai (10226508)
Address: De Clercqstraat 63-‐3, 1053AD, Amsterdam, NL E-‐mail: baixiaoquan@hotmail.com
CHAPTER ONE-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐5
Theory and Methodology 1.1 What is Chineseness?
1.2 Chineseness Makes Chinese Cinema or Chinese Cinema Makes Chineseness? 1.3 Place, Time, Memory
1.4 Conclusion
CHAPTER TWO-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐21
Jia Fang Yi Fang (Dream Factory): Zhong Guo Meng (the Chinese Dream) in Beijing 2.1 Introduction
2.2 Beijing, the Location of Dreams
2.3 Ci Jiu Ying Xin: Past, Present, and Future 2.4 Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐41
Da Wan (Big Shot’s Funeral): Male-‐Centered Chineseness in An Everyday-‐Life China 3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Intercultural Boundary of Chineseness in Da Wan
3.3 The Image of An Everyday-‐Life China Differing from the Exotic and Mythic China in Cinema
3.4 Recalled New Year Memory of Chineseness in the Time-‐image 3.5 Ge You, the Off-‐screen“Da Wan”in the Film Da Wan
3.6 Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐58
Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are the One): Extended Territory and Female Perspective of Chineseness
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Hokkaido: A Place of “Love” and “Nearness” that Articulates Chineseness 4.3 Watching Time Go By Through the Shifting of Scenery
CONCLUSION-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐75
Summary and Possibilities for Future Research
FILMOGRAPHY-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐81 BIBLIOGRAPHY-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐83
Introduction
Articulations of Chineseness in Feng Xiaogang’s He Sui Pian (New Year Comedies)
In Chinese language, the term he sui (i.e. he means celebrating and sui means the year) is a time-concept word that refers to the celebration of Chinese New Year. According to the tradition of Chinese Drama established in the Tang dynasty in ancient China, when it came to the end of a year, famous actors would gather together to perform a drama with a festive theme in order to celebrate the coming year as well as give thanks to their fans for their support in the previous year. Thus, this kind of performance is called he sui da xi (New Year Drama). With the development of cinema in Hong Kong in the 1900s, the concept of he sui da xi was transferred into cinema as he sui pian (New Year Film). According to film historian Yu Muyun, the first New Year film in Hong Kong was a Cantonese film Hua Kai Fu Gui (Bloom and Prosper), which was released in 1937（1997）. As a festive film, it tells a story about a family winning the lottery on Chinese New Year’s eve, losing it, and recovering it in the end (Wong 1997: 128). In the year 1997, the first New Year film produced in mainland China was Jia Fang Yi Fang (Dream Factory) directed by Feng Xiaogang. It tells a story about four friends, who open a company called Hao meng yi ri you (i.e. A One-day nice dream) to help people realize their dreams within a single day. The success of Jia Fang Yi Fang opened the market for New Year films in mainland China. Since his first New Year film, director Feng Xiaogang has launched one festive film at the end of each year (e.g. Bu Jian Bu San (Be There or Be Square), 1998; Mei Wan Mei Liao (The Endless), 1999; and Yi Sheng Tan Xi (A Sign), 2000). These festive films all achieved good results at the box office and gradually Feng Xiaogang became the emblematic Image in the filmmaking of New Year films in mainland China. For Chinese people, the Chinese New Year is a joyful time that should be celebrated with happiness, wishes, and hopes. Therefore, to match with the festive atmosphere of New Year, Chinese New Year films are mostly comedies
aiming at entertaining audiences with humor. Thus, I prefer to use the English “New Year comedy” to he sui pian to describe this genre because the comedic feature is important to this thesis. According to Steve Neale, “genre does not consist only of the classification of films; genres also consist of ‘specific’ systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (1990: 46). From this point of view, the New Year comedy is a genre in Chinese cinema since “the audiences are in general upholding a positive outlook at this special time of a year to expect something as cheerful as the way they are feeling in the theatres” (Law 2010: 106).
Compared with other New Year comedies in Hong Kong and mainland China, Feng Xiaogang’s New Year comedies always make a deep impression on the audience. Every year, after Feng releases his New Year comedy, the film soon arouses hot discussions in mainland China, either in face-to-face chats or in social networks online. However, compared with works of art-house cinema in China, Feng’s New Year comedies receive relatively little attention in academic research, which tends to focus on the more serious, critical, and independent films, such as the works of Chinese Sixth-Generation director Jia Zhangke. It is a fact, however, the popularity of Feng’s New Year comedies raises analysis of their success in the domestic film market. Nevertheless, since Feng’s films are usually regarded by film critics as the result of his inclinations or talent for pleasing popular audiences in an apparently commercial form (McGrath 2005), the studies of these films mainly focus on the commercial strategies, such as the production cooperation, from the side of production and circulation that contributes to making a profit. Given Feng’s films’ tremendous popularity in mainland China, according to my viewing experience and analysis of the films’ content, I would argue that the reason why Feng’s New Year comedies appeal to audiences is that they not only amuse people but they provide satire of social conditions upon which audiences can reflect afterwards. As a spectator of Feng’s New Year comedies, I laughed countless times during each viewing. At first, I believed what I was laughing at was inconsequential, but I soon discovered that
these scenes remained in the back of my mind. Later, I found myself discussing these scenes with friends. I found that the themes of Feng’s films resonated with me and I felt as though I have experienced or am currently experiencing similar situations in my own life. This experience made me realize that the festive films Feng purposely produced for the celebration of Chinese New Year were more than entertainment since they forced me to reflect and think about how the images and dialogue in the film correlates to what was going on in Chinese society. I am therefore interested in analyzing Feng’s New Year comedies beyond their mere entertainment value. I call this value that goes beyond entertainment the “contemplation impact” of Feng’s New Year comedies. Considering this, I would suggest that Feng’s New Year comedies create a potential transference of individuals’ experiences to more general feelings about mainland China as a whole so that they store a collective memory of Chinese people towards the Chinese New Year. Through this potential transference, the term Chineseness, which stands for the characteristics of Chinese people, could also be articulated. Therefore, I think it is important to research Feng’s New Year comedies as valuable cultural phenomena within which the Chineseness is performed.
There are three cases studies of Feng’s New Year comedies in my research. The three films are carefully selected not only because they carry the significance of the year in which they were produced, but also because they stand for the three different periods of Feng’s New Year filmmaking: the start of establishing the style of his New Year comedies, the mature model of his New Year comedies, and the new development of his model of New Year comedies. Paying attention to the three periods of Feng’s filmmaking activities allows me to examine different angles for the study of Chineseness. For instance, in Jia Fang Yi Fang, I will focus more on how place is connected with the articulation of Chineseness while in Da Wan and Fei Cheng Wu Rao I will analyze how the interaction of genders affects the performance of Chineseness in regard to a specific focus on the male-centered image and the female perspective respectively.
Chapter one contains an elaboration of the theory and methodology of the thesis, where I will explore the relationship between cinema and Chineseness via a
discussion of place, time, and memory. Through the representation of images in regards to time and space in cinema, I will explain how cinema helps to construct an image of the nation while the nation also contributes to cinematic performance. In the second chapter I will analyze the construction of Chineseness in the film Jia Fang Yi Fang from the aspects of zhong guo meng (the Chinese dream) and the territorial importance of Beijing as the recognized cultural place serving for the collective memory of the mainland Chinese people. In the third chapter, I will analyze how the film Da Wan exhibits the construction of Chineseness from the star image of Ge You and the depicted everyday life of the people therein, which is represented as a contrast to the exotic and mythic image of cinematic China. In the fourth chapter, I will analyze the film Fei Cheng Wu Rao with a focus on the more distinct depiction of mainland Chinese women and the significance attached to place identity of Hokkaido. Through this examination, I will attempt to find out how Chineseness is constructed through the women’s performances and how the place identity of Chineseness is extended from Beijing to a foreign site. In sum, rather than confining my investigation to a single concept of who “Chinese” people are, in this thesis, I will attempt to discover how we can understand a variety of Chinesenesses and how we can view Feng Xiaogang’s New Year comedies as a unique prism that helps us explore some of these Chinese identities.
Chapter One Theory and Methodology
1.1 What is Chineseness?
As a native Chinese speaker growing up in mainland China, I used to think I knew China’s identity and the meaning of Chineseness. However, after I met a few friends from Taiwan and Hong Kong in the Netherlands, I gradually became cautious when using the term Chineseness, which I had taken for granted. This word helped me define everything I was familiar with about China. When I meet a new person who has an Asian face, I find myself wanting to ask “Are you Chinese?” When I did venture to ask this question, more often than not people responded with, “No, I am Taiwanese/Hongkongnese.” I was not surprised they used the words “Taiwanese” and “Hongkongnese” to identify themselves. In the beginning, I thought they just gave prominence to the geographical location of their identities, like I sometimes use “Sichuanese” to emphasize the fact that I come from Sichuan province. This way of expressing personal identity is called “place identity,”, which refers to an individual’s expressed identification with a place（Krupat 1983）.That is, this is a self-identification that people use to describe themselves in terms of belonging to a specific place. However, after continuously hearing these answers, paying particular attention to their negation of my question with an immediate “no,” I realized the use of “Taiwanese/Hongkongnese” was instead politically driven. That is, my friends were using these terms to replace the term “Chinese” that I had originally used to define them. Admittedly, due to historical and political reasons, Taiwan and Hong Kong are different from mainland China. The difference between Taiwanese, Hongkongnese, and nei di ren (i.e. Chinese-speaking people who originally come from mainland China) is that the former two places have long colonial histories, which led the denizens in these areas to come into contact with western or westernized culture earlier than the nei di ren. In addition, these distinct groups of people have different attitudes towards how to keep the ancient culture (e.g. Confucian culture). Some Taiwanese claim to be more “Chinese” than the nei di ren because they integrate
more traditions with present day society. For instance, traditional Chinese characters are still officially and widely used in Taiwan, while in mainland China, the simplified Chinese characters are promoted and commonly used. Some nei di ren attack the alleged “Chineseness” of Taiwanese people by arguing that they are already westernized and therefore affected to behave in a way more like western people. For example, Taiwanese people are often considered to be more open-minded rather than conservative as ancient Chinese tradition dictates. Rey Chow claims, “Chinese from the mainland are [often felt to be] more “authentic” than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been “westernized”（1991: 28）. Obviously differences exist, but in my opinion, the more interesting question does not lie in a matter of which group is the most authentic “Chinese.” Indeed, one might go so far as to claim there is no authentic “Chinese.” Whether used by Hongkongnese, Taiwanese, or the nei di ren, ideas surrounding the term “Chinese” are referred to the Chineseness situated with certain time and place to perform a renewed meaning of the term in the context of the changing social environment. Chineseness is a cultural and social product that needs to be understood within the time and space of its perpetuation and use. In short, the response of my new friends has encouraged me to rethink what I mean by “Chinese.” Though I was born and raised in a small city in mainland China, I prefer to use an example from a citizen’s life in a big city such as Beijing to articulate to my foreign friends how social changes happened to “Chinese” people’s lives in recent years. This choice seems rather conspicuous. Why do I not use the example of a mainland village dweller such as myself to discuss the changes that have occurred in “Chinese” people’s lives? And why do I consciously prioritize my “Han Chinese” identity to represent everything that I map onto the “Chinese” lifestyle or “Chinese” ideas instead of focusing on the thoughts and behaviors of minority groups in mainland China such as the Tibetans? Admittedly, my understanding of the term “Chinese” is very subjective and limited. It is based on my personal experience but also restricted by it. To some extent, I perform a sort of Chineseness as a nei di ren from the people around me or from the mainland Chinese media reporting that I read about nei di ren either from the newspaper or the
television. To what extent do others in my community share the sort of Chineseness that I find myself performing? Or, more generally speaking, do I even agree with other people’s articulation of Chineseness if I don’t experience it in the same way? Do I regard myself as one of the imagined members, such as the constructed Chinese images in Feng Xiaogang’s New Year comedies? Taking a personal stance in this manner, I intend to compare my perception of Chineseness with what I understand from other people’s articulations of Chineseness in order to rethink what the term “Chinese” means and how it gets used.
I used to hold the notion that people in Taiwan and Hong Kong share some basic “Chinese” characteristics with nei di ren. Here, the “Chinese” identity I refer to is mainly considered from the aspects of people using the same typeface characters, worshiping the same ancestors, and keeping the same cultural traditions like the celebration of the lunar Chinese spring festival, etc. I thought, no matter if the area was governed by the Republic of China (ROC) or the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or if it was a Special Administrative Region (SAR), there was only one China and the people who belonged to this nation were Chinese. This definition smacks of cultural essentialism. The concept of “Chinese” identity I once held is, according to Chow, “fantasized as somehow better—longer in existence, more intelligent, more scientific, more valuable, and ultimately beyond comparison”（2000: 5）. This cultural essentialistic concept of Chineseness becomes problematic when taking into account my friends from Taiwan and Hong Kong and their emphatic answers of “no.” Although local or global identity develops from a historical and social timeline, it is never as stable as it could be, particularly in today’s transnational global culture. In Hybridity and（G）local Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema, Chu Yiuwai defines the term “glocal” as an account of the global dimension in the contrived local identity portrayed in post-1997 transnational Chinese cinema. He claims, “in this sense, one must refuse to believe that identity is a kind of determinate “being.” It is a kind of “becoming,” and Chineseness should be seen as an “open signifier”（2005： 325）. Chu’s idea of an “open signifier” towards Chineseness, on the one hand, requires the mobility of identity. On the other hand, instead of “being,” “becoming”
provides space for the various articulations of Chineseness. According to Chu, there is no fixed definition of Chinese identity. In fact, we can make more productive interpretations of what Chineseness can include when we look at different groups of Chinese people in different places. In her Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem, Chow claims, “Chineseness can no longer be held as a monolithic given tied to the mythic homeland but must rather be understood as a provisional, ‘open signifier’”（1998: 24）. In my opinion, the open signifier is a mobile term, which helps to understand the characteristics of Chineseness in a way sensitive to both time and space. Positioning the definition of Chineseness within the dynamic changes of space and time breathes new life into the term, allowing it to become a productive social category that helps us discuss identities. I agree that social activities have an impact on the characteristics of identities, which are formed in particular places at certain times. The place not only functions as the witness of social activities but it also exists as a memory place in which people can physically recall where identities form. Moreover, time precipitates identity and liberates it from conformity. As time goes by, some characteristics of identity are maintained (e.g. mainland Chinese people continue to celebrate the Chinese Spring Festival) while some characteristics of identity change (e.g. mainland Chinese people traditionally ate at home with the whole family on New Year’s Eve, but now more Chinese families choose to eat outside on that special night). Understanding Chineseness helps us comprehend certain social phenomena and in particular on the continent of mainland China, why many nei di ren, which contains a large group of people who identify as Chinese, react in certain ways when certain social events occur.
1.2 Chineseness Makes Chinese Cinema or Chinese Cinema Makes Chineseness?
As I have outlined above, I prefer to understand and research the term Chineseness as an open and mobile signifier. In her work, On Not Speaking Chinese, Ien Ang expresses a similar preference towards the identity of Chinese because “Chineseness is a category whose meanings are not fixed and pregiven, but constantly renegotiated
and rearticulated both inside and outside China”（1994: 25）. Ien Ang’s argument points out the mobile process that the term Chineseness undergoes. Chineseness is renegotiated and rearticulated not only in its birthplace but also outside China. The mobility of Chineseness, particularly in today’s global world, geographically challenges the usual way to research the term in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is possible for Chineseness to be discussed in an international context. Hence, whether inside or outside China, Chineseness can be performed and articulated. However, the problem of finding a proper embodiment to reflect this negotiation process of Chineseness in different contexts remains.
When it comes to how the imagined collective identity can be communicated among people in the same community, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the “bridge function” of media to connect each social member. According to Anderson, various media forms such as films are the bearers of a mediated individual identity. Anderson claims that disparate individuals are able to imagine themselves as belonging to the same community through media representation（1991: 33-5）. Cinema, as a powerful form of media representation, not only reflects what is in real life, but also creates reality on-screen. It is like a mirror that reflects what is within sight while the edge of the mirror stimulates people’s curiosity to see what they cannot see. When talking about how films can be linked to a cultural and national identity, Steve Fore suggests:
In East Asia where Chan is already a major star, the “Chineseness” of his persona is, of course, more closely aligned with the cultural heritage a life experiences of the average moviegoer, whether at a primary level of cultural proximity (for audiences in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC), or at a secondary level (for non-Chinese audiences in Asian countries where Hong Kong Movies are widely distributed). (1997: 247)
According to Fore, the recognition of Chineseness in cinema is aligned with how familiar the audience is with Chinese knowledge and culture. As a popular film genre both at home and abroad, Chinese Kung Fu films always depict the leading male character as a strong-willed man, who fights his enemies (often foreigners) with his
own bodily strength. David Desser suggests the construction of Chinese identity in the Kung Fu film is articulated with nationalism and “comes to be literally embodied on the male body of stars”（2005: 281）. The image of the on-screen male character is presented as a hero to protect his motherland and people. This representation of heroes in Chinese society makes a Chinese audience member proud to be of the heroes’ ilk. Stephen Teo summaries this kind of film’s impact on audiences as “a way of feeling pride in one’s identity”（1997: 110）. Desser’s idea of the constructed Chineseness in Kung Fu films is also supported by Tony Rayns in his research of the Chinese Kung Fu star Bruce Lee. Rayns thinks the displayed “masculinist” dimension of Bruce Lee brings up the male-oriented/dominated ideology to present Chineseness in Kung Fu films（1984: 29）. Considering this, it seems that Kung Fu films contribute to the construction of Chineseness in a way of masculinist Chinese nationalist imagery, which builds a bridge between the characters on-screen and the audiences via the self-identification of pride. Although Kung Fu films are different from many Chinese patriotic films, which are always set in a historical war background to instill within the people a patriotic education, they too perpetuate a good and virtuous image of China, which has the effect of making the belonged “Chinese” person feel good and virtuous about their identity. Compared with Kung Fu films, some Chinese-language films that express commentary on China’s social realities are internationally well known but ignored in mainland China due to censorship by the PRC, such as Yellow Earth (dir. by Chen Kaige, 1984). The reason of these films’ unpopularity in mainland China, suggested by Bonnie S. McDougall, is that they present a “bad” image of China (e.g. negative image describing the miserable life of Chinese people under the control of Communist party), which is censored by the PRC to keep the positive image of China it promotes （1991: 102）. Does Chineseness have to be situated in a “good” or “bad” image of China? If so, does Chinese cinema give China a “good” or a “bad” image? Or does the “good” or “bad” China make Chinese cinema?
In If China Can Say No, Can China Make Movies? Or, Do Movies Make China? Rethinking National Cinema and National Agency (1998), Chris Berry talks about
national agency, a problematic element, in regard to Chinese cinema. In Berry’s elaboration on the relationship between cinema and national identity, he criticizes attempts to say national cinema, as a national agency like Chinese cinema, assumes nations make movies（130）. Drawing on theories of performativity, he suggests that movies help to construct a national identity because the concept of China as a national agency is discursively produced and is a socially and historically contingent collective entity（ibid）. In my opinion, Berry’s articulation of national agency is an extension of Anderson’s (1991) felicitous “imagined communities” in regard to rethinking the nation “not as something taken for granted but as a socially and historically specific idea of community”（Berry 1998: 136）. Anderson’s idea of the nation as “imagined community” presupposes a concept of collectivity and vision of national belonging with which society incorporates to be recognized and unified. He suggests nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”（1991: 6）. His articulation of nation supports a social space for the identity of people in certain groups to be collected and defined. Homi K. Bhabha says the “imagined community” is “the nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes this instability of knowledge”（1990: 1）. From this point of view, I agree with Berry’s argument that Chinese cinema, as a performative art, helps to construct the image of China. However, Berry seems to ignore the fact that the performative, or I would say the exhibitive of cinema, is built upon a first step. The first step is a basis of the performative to be performed and becomes a matter of collective identity. The author or the director of a film collects what they observe from people’s speech and behavior in everyday life and then applies these identity characteristics to a film project. Taking this into account, people’s social activities observed in national life can become the source of on-screen identities in cinema. Cinema not only helps construct an image of the nation, but the nation also contributes to the performance in cinema. As a matter of fact, film narratives are organized in a contingent process that juggles historical ‘facts’ and
myths（Middleton and Edwards 1990：9）. Therefore, the narrative effect of film is powerful enough to let an individual identity be presented as a collective identity while imposing the collective identity on-screen to be perceived as an individual identity in the minds of the spectators. The shift between the individual and the collective is closely related to how a spectator associates their own personal memories with what they see in a film as well as how the film functions as a memory for the audience. In my opinion, memory is key to understanding how narratives construct identity, which I will elaborate on later in this chapter.
In addition to Berry’s articulation of the relationship between Chineseness and Chinese cinema, I will borrow the model that he adopts from Judith Butler (1997) to trace and account for the ways in which Chinese cinema participates in the construction of Chinese identity. According to Berry’s reading of Butler, her work on performativity “offers an account of the construction of subjectivity and agency that is neither universalist, nor determinist, nor devoid of historical and social specificity” （Berry 1998：145）. Butler’s produced account of subjectivity and agency is grounded by the concepts of citation and iterability. Berry argues, “utilizing Althusserian ideas like interpellation to note the paradoxical discursive effect whereby subject positions are implied to pre-exist the very texts that constructs them” (ibid). Butler’s insight “relocates ‘being’ from transcendent space into the materiality of discourse[…]Her observations are socially and historically grounded by noting that each such citation is part of a chain that links different times and places, making it different from the original it claims to repeat but simultaneously conditioned by that original it requires for the work of citation”（ibid）. Butler explains her understanding of performativity to interpellation as:
If the one who delivers it does not author it, and the one who is marked by it is not described by it, then the workings of interpellative power exceed the subjects constituted by its terms, and the subjects so constituted exceed the interpellations by which they are animated.（1997: 34）
which helps to understand the characteristics of Chineseness in a sensitive way to both time and space. Berry’s interpretation of Butler’s performativity suggests that consideration of time and place for a cited work can be extended to provide a model that lets us “think of cinema in a dynamic relation to the national, as something that mutates in every citation and every screening (which is a form of citation in itself)” （Berry 1998：145）. In other words, Chineseness is performed under the dynamic, contested, and competing environments that ground it. And cinema is a participant of the construction of a variety of possible Chinesenesses.
1.3 Place, Time, Memory
In his famous work, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Pierre Nora discusses the difference between memory and history. According to Nora, memory is the event that actually happened while the history is the subjective representation of the past（Nora 1989）. Les Lieux de Mémoire describes the artificial landscape of the modern recreation of national and cultural memory, which includes geographical places, historical personalities, monuments, emblems, and symbols. For the discussion of “sites of memory,” Nora suggests that a place of memory constitutes a symbolic entity that relates the physical place to the collective memory, a place “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”（1989: 7）. The material reality of memory connects it to physical and tangible locations. Along with personal memory, a person’s relationship to the environment can make the place-based identity become “part of the person”, which he or she acknowledges to define the self in his or her community. In addition, personal reminiscences that take root in people and everyday events, play an important role in binding people to each other and to a locale（Kong 1999: 21）. Compared with personal memory, the collective memory is established on shared experiences of a people or community. These shared experiences can be understood as what the members of a community choose to remember and forget. José van Dijck provides the productive notion that “personal memory can only exist in relation to collective memory: in order to remember ourselves, we have to
constantly align and gauge the individual with the collective, but the sum of individual memories never equals collectivity”（2007：25）. In his discussion of “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson quotes from Ernest Renan’s articulation of how nation is formed:
The essence of a nation is that all the individuals (forming this nation) have much in common and also that they have forgotten many things [...] Every French citizen must have forgotten the night of St Bartholomy, the massacres in the Midi in the 13th century.（1996: 199）
Taking this in mind, collective memory is a social and public memory with “selective interpretations of the past as members of a community decide what is worthy of remembering”（Chang 2005: 248）. The construction of collective memory is commemoratively used as the unifying needs of the community to maintain its present and projected future by various social groups like government officials and academic （Till 1999）. Taking this into consideration it would seem that places are able to form collective identities because they are described with a symbolic entity creating a focal point of identity with which individuals can identify to find a sense of belonging. The three films that I am going to analyze in the next chapters are focused on the territory of Beijing. Each story begins in the politically-centered city of Beijing. In terms of the main characters’ social background, each of them is set in Beijing. The territory of the film also extends itself to rural places and foreign sites outside of Beijing. By doing so, the films broaden the space in order to trace the connections of territories. Places, along with the events occurring there, are not only kept as an evidence for what was once there, but are also woven into the construction of a community’s memories. Keeping this in mind, the negotiation of Chineseness in Feng’s New Year comedies is obviously related to the place where Chinese identities are articulated and performed. How these territories are related to each other can provide a possible answer to the question “Whose Chineseness?”
The Chinese New Year comedy, as the name indicates, is always released at the end of the year with a festival theme to celebrate and welcome the coming year.
Therefore, the three New Year comedies are also significant in terms of timing. The year 1997 has a far-reaching significance in the history of China. The hand over of Hong Kong from the British government to the People’s Republic of China is the moment for China to turn over its allegedly humiliating past and look forward to a new “great” China. The year 2001 witnesses the glory of the “great” China to join the Word Trade Organization and win the bid to host the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing. At that time, China was still in a state of transition, reshaping itself into a new image of “great” China in this more open and international environment. The year 2008 becomes a huge chance for China to present the fruits of its modern revolution and its effort to become a “great” nation. The assumed success of the Beijing Olympic Games and the supposedly effective government response to the public emergency during and after the Sichuan Earthquake suggests a positive image of China that the PRC tries to promote via media reports as “a big, united country that takes responsibility for itself both at home and abroad”. In the trend of globalization, China is trying to find its own position as a “great” nation. Bhabha suggests that it is not the nuances of the facts that matter, what is significant is the way in which nationals choose to construct their collective memories, that is, how they narrate themselves into pride and glory（Bhabha 1990）. Analyzing Feng’s three New Year comedies side-by-side can provide us with clues to grasp the changes and maintenance of Chineseness during these key moments in China’s recent history.
Feng’s New Year comedies aim at reaching spectators from mainland China. More specifically speaking, the target audiences are mainly from classes including the urban intelligentsia and city dwellers, ranging from youth to middle-aged people. To some extent, the target audiences stand for a large group of “Chinese” whose personal experiences or observations are related to what is going on in Chinese society particularly represented by city life. Feng’s New Year comedies tell the story about a “normal” urban resident. Putting the ordinary city dweller’s life on-screen, giving the main characters multifaceted and diverse personalities, and setting personal life against the background of current social situations and China’s undergoing changes, Feng presents something larger than simply displaying the life of particular individual.
In fact, the New Year comedies attempt to move toward something commonly shared and tactile by the audiences. In other words, this group of people recognize themselves in the images of Feng’s New Year comedies. Apart from using “Feng shi you mo” (i.e. Feng Xiaogang’s style of humor embodied in the tongue-in-cheek dialogue of his New Year comedies) to entertain audiences, what I find distinctive and important is that Feng takes advantage of traditions, which I regard as the symbol of the past, to recollect China’s identity. For example, the happy endings of his New Year comedies seem to come from the wisdom of a Chinese idiom “Ci jiu ying xin” (i.e. Ring out the old year and ring in the new), which helps maintain a positive attitude towards life taught to us by our Chinese ancestors. However, if Feng simply displays the historical content of this old saying to construct a New Year memory of Chinese people, he would run the risk of constructing Chineseness in a conservative way to purely demonstrate what characteristics of identities are reserved according to tradition and history. If so, the displayed identity of China would be trapped in the past. To avoid this, on the basis of being present and looking back at the past but not being trapped by it, while imagining a possible future, Feng creates new expressions of tradition in Chinese cinema that rearticulates a more dynamic and renewed identity of China.
The main way that cinema approaches its audience is through images. What images can present, both visible and invisible, and how audiences perceive images can be determined by what kind of resonance can be aroused from the viewing experience. The resonance is the starting point for collective memory and identity to be generated, recognized, and passed on. As most spectators experience while watching a film, they require memories to make meanings from the images. Yet, at the same time, films are also producing their own memories to let individual memory become collective memory via displaying images. Through this process of building a selected collective memory via remembering and forgetting, the national identity functions and is enhanced by the collective memory while the collective memory is an inner force that maintains the national identity as a unit. In his analysis of Cambodian national identity, Milton Takei argues, “Collective memory is the key to
understanding why people retain a certain group identity. Both the distant past and more recent events can be important, since all these experiences can be part of a groups collective memory”（1998: 59）. The interaction between memory and identity thus makes “memory a central force through which our identity is constructed and these memories are embedded in institutions and in practices as well as in brain traces” （Ross 1999: 65）.
The three films I chose to study are obviously similar in their aims to negotiate China’s identity with the memory of Chinese New Year. They each pay attention to the Chinese New Year memory and character identity, particularly of the actor played by Ge You. The focused New Year memory and character identity can be researched as filters through which to examine the maintenance and changes of Chinese national identity. How could the presentation of New Year memory in regard to time be narrated in Feng’s New Year comedies to help imagine China’s identity? To answer this question, I am indebted to Gilles Deleuze’s work in philosophy of time, particularly his argument of the time-image as well as the third synthesis of time he puts forward, which allows me to engage with how the narrative of time is used to construct a national identity. David Martin-Jones draws on the above-mentioned concepts in his inspiring book Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity. As the title indicates, Martin-Jones explains how the application of Deleuze’s concept of time and memory help us comprehend how narrative time constructs national identity（2006）. He suggests：
Using Deleuze’s work enables a greater understanding of the ways in which narrative time is used to construct national identity in cinema. It illuminates how films with disrupted, multiple, jumbled, or reversed narratives (films that appear to be hybrid movement-/time-images), formally demonstrate the renegotiation of national identity at times of historical transformation.（ibid: 5）
The time-image as defined by Deleuze is “apt to be read—it is a legible image—as much as it is seen or given to visibility. It prompts the spectator to think through the signs with which it articulates narrative matter”（Adrian 2010：286）. Differing from
the movement-image, which consists of the perception-image, action-image, and affection-image, the time-image is not successive and chronological. In other words, it doesn’t obey the chronological order and narratological representation of actions and reactions. Considering this, the time-image makes it possible for the past, future, and present to be indistinguishable in cinema. The blurring of time scopes and, the possible coexistence of different timeliness “free us from our everyday human perceptions and cognitions”（Shaviro 1993: 30）. Hence, the coexistence of past, present, and future defines the imaginary. This defined imaginary of the time-image forms the memory of an identity not trapped by its past or separated from its future. Thus, the imagined identity of China, an open and mobile signifier, could be traced to the presentation of memory in Chinese cinema. According to Deleuze, the third synthesis of time is the future as such. The present and past are dimensions of the future（Pisters 2011: 268）. Deleuze defends the importance of the past and the present to pave the way for the future since they contribute to the active synthesis of understanding and memory, which contributes to duration in the time-image（ibid: 266）. Deleuze asks, “Is it in the present that we make memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past? ”（1989: 52）. The present is more or less the actual, and the past/future is more or less the virtual. Therefore, there are two distinct axes of time. Time presses ever further into the future since our store of memory increases over time. When it comes to the time-image in the third synthesis, repetition “has no in-itself, but it does change something in the mind of the observer of repetitions. On the basis of what we perceive repeatedly in the present, we recall, anticipate or adapt our expectations in a synthesis of time”（Deleuze 1994: 71）. Relating to the film Jia Fang Yi Fang (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 1997), the repetition of helping different people realize their individual dreams day after day, along with the repetition of various clients’ dreaming of experiencing what hardly happens in their real lives, not only drives the four friends to expect what the next client and his dream would be, but also encourages the audience to anticipate an ordinary person’s dreams. Through the shift of reality and non-reality reflected by the time-image, the expectation of the future depends on the past and the present situation. As mentioned
in the beginning, all Chinese New Year comedies are released at the end of a year. Not surprisingly, the dates that the stories take place in Feng’s New Year comedies are also synchronized with the release dates. For instance, Jia Fang Yi Fang was first released in 20 December 1997, while the events depicted in the film take place throughout 1997. The film concludes with a character saying, “1997 nian guo qu le, wo hen huai nian ” (i.e. Finally, the year 1997 has passed, but I miss it so much).
Image one: 1997 nian guo qu le, wo hen huai nian
In real time and space, the spectator watching this film at the end of 1997 might very well feel nostalgic as they recall their personal memories of the year. Due to the synchronization of time in film and in life, it is easy for the audience to forget that they are watching a film. As the boundaries of reality begin to blur, so too does the filmic memory blur with the personal memory of the spectator. In contrast, however, some audience members could also be acutely aware of their distance from the film since what is happening in their own lives might be quite different from what is going on in the film, even though the events take place around the same time period.
1.4 Conclusion
identities in Feng Xiaogang’s three Chinese New Year comedies, using them as filters through which to examine the articulations of Chineseness in cinema. With the “open signifier” in mind, I will try to analyze how Feng Xiaogang’s New Year comedies negotiate, construct, and present Chineseness in Chinese New Year comedy cinema. I prefer to regard the New Year comedy as a particular genre of Chinese cinema. Additionally, to reveal the impact of Feng’s New Year comedies on the construction of a renegotiated concept of Chineseness, in the next chapters, I will seek to answer two subsidiary questions: (1) how is the place connected with the Chineseness that Feng Xiaogang tries to define in his New Year comedies? and (2) In the context of New Year cinema, how do memories related to Chinese New Year contribute to the construction of a possible kind of identity of China in a certain time and space, including the past, present, and future of the imagined nation and its people?
Chapter Two
Jia Fang Yi Fang (Dream Factory): Zhong Guo Meng (the
Chinese Dream) in Beijing
Chineseness, or the imaginary cultural image of China, refers to a time and place in which things were clearer, more stable and comprehensible: a world that is in fact ‘purely imaginary’.
—Jarvie (1977: 94)
2.1 Introduction
The release of the film Jia Fang Yi Fang (Dream Factory) in the year 1997 not only sets Feng Xiaogang’s foot on the journey of He Sui Pian (New Year comedies), but also opens the market for New Year comedies in mainland China. The film Jia Fang Yi Fang is the first successful New Year comedy produced in mainland China. Based on Chinese popular writer Wang Shuo’s social satire novel (1992), Jia Fang Yi Fang establishes Feng Xiaogang’s filming style as “entertaining social comedy punctuated with tongue-in-cheek humorous dialogue and packed with popular TV/film stars with whom audiences were already very familiar”（Kong 2007: 229）. Here, in my analysis of Feng’s New Year comedy, the meaning of either the term “Chinese” or “Chineseness” is based on the filmic context, through which Feng brings the constructed images of a large group of people on-screen, speaking Mandarin Chinese and living in mainland China. From the construction of Chineseness in Feng’s New Year comedies, we can analyze how these supposed Chinese people perform on-screen.
Jia Fang Yi Fang presents seven different dreams around the theme zhong guo meng (the Chinese dream), which are used as indications of the Chinese dream. These individual dreams are highly selective and recalled to reflect a collective memory
under pressing social issues and contemporary concerns（Kong 2009）. With indigenous themes and contemporary concerns, Feng’s New Year comedies always choose the subject that “homes in on the hot topic of the year when each film was made”（ibid: 155）. More than 1.3 billion people live in mainland China, so why does Feng only choose to display seven individual dreams in order to represent the zhong guo meng? How do these dreams connect with the Chineseness that Feng constructs in New Year comedies? Whose dreams are they and what do these dreams stand for? I hope to answer these questions in the following chapter.
2.2 Beijing, The Location of Dreams
Before I tackle the question “whose Chinese dream,” I would like to first analyze why all the seven dreams took place in the same location of Beijing. Jia Fang Yi Fang tells a story about four friends (Yao Yuan played by Ge You, Qian Kang played by Feng Xiaogang, Zhou Beiyan played by Liu Pei, and Liang Zi played by He Bing), who open a company called Hao meng yi ri you (i.e. A one-day nice dream) to help people realize their dreams within a single day. The dream company’s operating principle is to serve their customers mainly by relieving them from the bother of their unfulfilled dreams in everyday life. The four friends start their business in Beijing in a small office in Qian Kang’s house that is typical for a Beijing yard. Moreover, the leading actor as well as the supporting cast is natives of Beijing. Therefore, it is easy for the mainland Chinese speakers to recognize the actors’ Beijing identity because of their Beijing dialects. As I mentioned earlier, the director Feng Xiaogang plays the role of the dream company’s manger (Qian Kang). Born and raised in Beijing, Feng is a native of Beijing. Looking through his New Year comedies, the stories are always set in Beijing and the leading actors are characterized as natives of Beijing. In addition, the talented Chinese comedian Ge You, also a native of Beijing, always plays the lead actor in Feng’s New Year comedies. Considering this, Jia Fang Yi Fang intentionally places Beijing at the center stage of Chineseness. When speaking about the impact that Chinese film director Zhang Yimou has had on his films to express the China he
knows about, Rey Chow suggests, “Although Zhang may think that he is making films about China, what he is doing is representing a timeless China of the past, which is given to us an imagined because retrospective mode”（1995: 145）. Like Zhang Yimou, Feng Xiaogang also tries to present an image China that he constructs from a particular understanding of his native city and his fellow people including those who are outside of Beijing. Feng is the observer as well as the creator of the Chineseness in his films. Tom Conley suggests, “Cinema is a surface on which viewers reflect their thinking, and in itself it is a medium or a machine that thinks with autonomy with respect to its viewers and creators”（ 2005: 179）. What Feng is doing is also providing his audience with a retrospective mode to perceive an imagined China. Yet, what differentiates Feng from Zhang is that the China he engages with is not timeless. Indeed, it is related to a particular time period the New Year, consisted of the coexistence of the past, present, and future. At the beginning, the film shows a blessing slogan, “Zhu quan guo ren min hu nian da ji” (i.e. Wish the national people good luck in the Tiger year1).
Image two: Zhu quan guo ren min hu nian da ji
1 Jia Fang Yi Fang was released at the end of year 1997 to celebrate the coming year 1998. The year 1998 is
Correlating to the festive celebration of Chinese New Year comedy, this slogan confirms that Jia Fang Yi Fang aims to celebrate the Chinese New Year for all the “national people” in China. However, since the film attaches great importance to Feng’s native city of Beijing, representations of either the characters or the setting are more or less related to the location of Beijing. Feng tries to reach all national people to celebrate the New Year with a Beijing story. Thus Feng’s practice opens the door to a question: how does a local story full of local memories and local identities relate to the nation as a greater collective?
Recall our earlier quotation of Pierre Nora’s discussion of the difference between memory and history in chapter one, memory is the event that actually happened while history is the subjective representation of the past（Nora 1989）. Nora’s notion of lieux de_mémoire describes the artificial landscape of the modern recreation of national and cultural memory, which includes geographical places, historical personalities, monuments, emblems, and symbols. For the discussion of “sites of memory,” Nora suggests that a place of memory constitutes a symbolic entity that relates the physical place to the collective memory, a place “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” （ibid: 7）. According to him, the material reality of memory connects it to physical and tangible locations. Considering Beijing’s political, historical, and economic influences on mainland China, Beijing could be read as a symbolic entity that is specifically recognized as a place in mind. Thus, it is not surprising that Feng regards his native city as a place where the memory of Chinese New Year is kept and Chineseness is produced. True, many social events have happened in Beijing and these events are usually given more attention since this metropolitan city is typically the birthplace of many hot social issues. In 1997, Deng Xiaoping, the politician and reformist leader of the Communist Party of China, died on February 19th in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping is considered "the architect" of China’s reform and opening-up policy. In response to his policy, many enterprises in mainland China started market-oriented reforms. Because of this economic reform, many workers in China lost their “tie fan wan” (iron rice bowl; i.e. their lifelong job). For many Chinese people, particularly the generation of my parents, “tie fan wan” constitutes a part of their lives’ dreams. In
1997, the topic of “xia gang” (laid-off) became such a hot social issue that people discussed it in most of their talks. That same year, the handover of Hong Kong as well as the successful damming of the headrace of the Three Gorges Dam are both alleged by Chinese media to be century-old dreams of Chinese people. The contrast between the social realities of those “laid-off” and the realization of those supposed dreams arouses a fierce discussion in mainland China, particularly in some big cities, such as Beijing, where living pressure is much greater than smaller cities and towns in China. The pressure of this conflict triggered individual thinking about certain life issues such as the value of money and marriage. The time and place accompanying those social concerns store individual contemplations as parts of the collective memory for the community. As the capital city of China, Beijing is one of the representative places that can be connected with the time of Chinese New Year to help people in mainland China look back at what they have experienced in the past year. With this in mind, we might say that Jia Fang Yi Fang emphasizes Beijing as a location, bringing out the relationship between place and identity. In my opinion, this relationship can be understood in two ways. On the one hand from the geographic consideration, Beijing is geographically marked to maintain personal distinctiveness or uniqueness in the film. In social science, research into settlement identity（Feldman 1990） and community identity（Hummon 1990） has focused on the perceived distinctiveness associated with being a “city,” “town,” or “country” person. This research proposes that distinctiveness summarizes a lifestyle and establishes that a person has a specific type of relationship with his or her home environment, which is clearly distinct from any other type of relationship. On the other hand from the perspective of what ideas are associated with Beijing, the city in the film is not just used as a name to mark a pure place where many social events have occurred. Indeed, Beijing is an imagined “place” that becomes the embodiment of the acclaimed Chinese identity and Chinese dreams. The city’s memory towards Chinese New Year not only belongs to the native people of Beijing but also can be extended to a broad scale of the “collective” as the film’s beginning slogan suggests. The embodying function of Beijing can be correlated to Nora’s idea of “sites of memory.” Beijing, as a local place, is able to
create a collective identity because it constitutes a symbolic entity with which most Chinese people can identify. One thing certainly identifiable with Beijing has to do with dreams. In the vein of the festive tradition of Chinese New Year comedies, Jia Fang Yi Fang celebrates the New Year by telling stories about zhong guo meng (the Chinese dream). What is defined as a Chinese dream? Chinese news reports declared the historical moment when the British government handed over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China a realization of zhong guo meng. When Beijing won the bid to hold the 2008 Olympic Games, this issue was marked as a realization of zhong guo meng. After China's first manned spacecraft had successfully launched, this success was praised as a realization of zhong guo meng. The Chinese media’s use of the term zhong guo meng suggests that zhong guo meng is a national dream. It stands for the longing of a nation realized. Admittedly, the media’s use of zhong guo meng is more or less propaganda to raise the term to a political height. The zhong guo meng reported by media enhances the formation of national pride, which the Chinese government uses strategically to unite its people. Although I use the same Chinese phrase zhong guo meng to discuss the theme of dreams in Jia Fang Yi Fang, here, the definition of zhong guo meng is marked with individual dream but not limited by personal dreaming. Except for the common use of zhong guo meng as a reference to the proud or traumatic memory of a nation, it could also be understood from the angle of the real desire of a human mind, generated in a person’s everyday life.
There are seven individual dreams in Jia Fang Yi Fang. The dreamers come from different social backgrounds, ranging from an ordinary chef to a famous movie star. The content of the dreams varies. Some of them are rooted in fantasy, while others are rooted in reality. For instance, a bookstore owner dreams to live for one day as General Patton, while a working-class man wishes his ill wife could spend the rest of her time in their own house instead of the dormitory in Beijing. These different people carry different dreams with them but they all live in the same place: Beijing. No matter if the dream starts from a personal fascination with historical Images (i.e. Patton) or a personal experience of everyday life, it originates in Beijing. The shared location of all these dreams is consistent with the widely recognized image of Beijing
in Chinese society. For most people in mainland China, Beijing, like Shanghai and Guangzhou, is a big, modern city with more opportunities than that of many small towns in China. It offers more space for reaching personal achievement, but it also kills many people’s dreams of success due to the fierce competition. Feng’s use of Beijing as the setting for discussing the Chinese dream shows that he knows well what his audiences are familiar with and what they might easily recognize. Differing from the media’s use of zhong guo meng to enhance the national pride, the presentations of zhong guo meng in Jia Fang Yi Fang place more emphasis on the individual life and on how they imagine their life to be. Although the seven dreams are fictional constructions, they do reflect some social phenomena in Chinese society. For example, the rich businessman in Jia Fang Yi Fang wants to live a life of hardship in a rural place because he is bothered by his city life. In mainland China, it is common for many Chinese people living in big cities to spend their weekends or holidays in the countryside to get away from the uproarious urban life. In real life, probably not many wealthy Chinese city folk would choose to live a life of hardship in the country. In the film, after the rich businessman experiences the hardship of living in a rural village, he cannot wait to return to the city. This illuminates the fact that many city residents are aware that although they get stressed out by the pressures of city life, they can not easily give up their lives and move to rural towns. When Qian Kang drives to pick up the rich man, the rich man refuses to get out of the car to say good-bye to the village people because he is afraid that Qian Kang will leave him again in the village. This sentiment is probably shared between the on-screen character and the audience. Therefore, Feng manages to connect constructed filmic images of Chinese people with the group of Chinese-speaking people who are sitting in front of the screen. This powerful acknowledgement hits the audience and gives them time to reflect. This effect could be one of the reasons that Feng’s New Year comedy has such wide appeal to audiences in mainland China and distinguishes itself from other New Year comedies. Benedict Anderson believes that disparate individuals are able to imagine themselves as belonging to the same community
through media representation （1991: 33-35）. Jia Fang Yi Fang is the result of Feng’s imagined Chineseness. Through this imagined Chinese image, audiences are encouraged to contemplate who they are and what they share with their fellow people such as the natives of Beijing. Anderson’s articulation of nation supports a social space for the identity of people in certain groups to be collected and defined. From this point of view, Beijing is imagined as the social space where contemplation of what the national people share is stimulated. The dreams that people have in Beijing are supposed to represent what the rest of the people in mainland China imagine their fellows are dreaming about as well as what they should do when they come across the things that the characters experience. For instance, after the husband experiences being wronged as a laborer, Yao Yuan tells the husband to respect and treat his wife better from now on. This didactic way of the film teaches its audiences how to keep harmony between the husband and the wife in a Chinese family. Affected by the long existing feudal concept of male superiority in the family, many Chinese women are not treated as equals to their husbands. To my understanding, the husband’s dream of being wronged is indeed a satire of the husband and thousands of husbands in Chinese families who treat their wives with no respect. As a result, Jia Fang Yi Fang advocates an equal relationship between husband and wife. The film uses the husband’s unfair treatment of his wife as an example to promote progressive, equal relationships that build a harmonious family dynamic in Chinese families.
The powerful narrative effect of film lets an individual identity represent the collective identity, while at the same time imposing this cinematic collective identity to be perceived as an individual identity in the minds of the spectators. Feng puts his native city on-screen and makes Beijing represent generic Chinese life. From this representation of the natives of Beijing or the life lived in Beijing, Feng’s New Year comedies try to transform a local identity into content for Chineseness and this observed Chineseness shows the spectators how a supposed “Chinese” from mainland China acts. Even some audiences in mainland China may not agree with the Chineseness that Feng displays on-screen. Their negation of the constructed Chineseness is also a process that they negotiate with the definition of Chineseness.
