By the Light of the Silver Lantern

THERE IS A SHAOXING STYLE OPERA called By the Light of the Red Lantern.' I
can't understand the lyrics, and I was never able to form any sort of idea of what the play is about, but I'm so mad for its charming and unpretentious title that I am going to adapt it here for my own use. "By the Light of the Silver Lantern" ought to suggest that I am going to borrow a mercury-vapor lamp to illuminate the everyday customs and feelings that surround us. Although the beams projected by the silver lantern often stray rather far from reality, they may well prompt us to reflect upon ourselves.
The two films I am going to discuss, The Struggle for Spring and The Song of Meiniang, are perhaps already out-of-date. In fact, they have already come and gone at the third-run theaters, but in the interior and in low-class entertainment centers in this city, they're still shown again and again. The people who make up these audiences may be unfamiliar to us, but the films they enjoy deserve comment.
This essay cannot be considered a film review, because what I'm looking at is not Chinese people in a film.
Both these films touch on the question of womanly virtue. The scope of womanly virtue can be quite broad, but most people understand it to mean
'A version of this essay originally appeared as a film review entitled "Wife, Vamp, Child" in The XXth Century, the pro-Axis English-language journal to which Chang was a frequent contributor. See The XXth Century 4, no. 5 (May 1943): 392-393.
 the question of how to be a good wife and, in particular, how to remain cheerfully monogamous with a polygamous husband. In The Song of Meiniang, the husband is an amorous man who frequents a house of ill repute that employs respectable married women. The favorite nightmare of such men is that they will encounter their own wives or daughters there, suddenly recognizing them as they approach with mincing steps. A shattering encounter of this sort is clearly rife with dramatic possibilities. And that is why our writers have drawn on such scenes for almost thirty years in their so-called social novels. This, however, is the first onscreen appearance of such a scenario. Meiniang is tricked into working at the brothel, and when her husband stumbles upon her there, he slaps her across the face. Before she is able to say a word in her defense, he disowns her.
When a husband goes out on the town to philander, does a wife have the right to follow his example? Modern girls quite openly denounce one-sided notions of marital fidelity. Neither is this question unfamiliar to Chinese wives of a more traditional sort. Provoked by some trivial matter to jealousy, they may threaten to take revenge by these very means, but whatever serious threats they may issue are taken half in jest by their husbands.
In a bantering and unreflective mood, men might even acknowledge a certain primitive justice in their wives' declarations of independence. It is very difficult to persuade a Chinese man to discuss this topic with a straight face, because he considers nothing more hilarious than adultery. But if we could force him to consider the proposition, he would surely veto it. From a purely logical standpoint, two blacks do not make a white and two wrongs do not make a right. But Chinese men have no use for logic such as this in arriving at their conclusions, because they realize that for a wife to carry out such a threat would not only be impractical but also disadvantageous to her. She might have the right in theory, but some rights are better left unused.
This wisdom notwithstanding, questions of this nature are apparently just the thing for enlivening after dinner repartee in mixed company. In The Song of Meiniang, a married women volubly defends her presence in an ill-famed establishment in a manner reminiscent of a formal speech at a banquet. Even so, our innocent heroine has never even dreamed of such a right, let alone the notion of rights as such. Drawn into these dubious environs under false pretenses by a man who has convinced her that he is the founder of a new charity school and that he would like her to be the principal, she is immediately discovered by her husband, and the fatal misunderstanding ensues. She never has a chance to consider whether she has a right to commit an offense, cast as she is into the abyss before even reaching the rim of the question.
 In The Struggle for Spring, the husband does not succumb to temptation until he has been filled to the gills with alcohol, and he regrets it afterward, which seems to make his act forgivable. But only the audience is aware of these mitigating circumstances. His wife never knows and never concerns herself with such questions, for it seems that she lacks even the slightest bit of curiosity. All that interests her is holding on to that fraction of him that still falls to her: in the event of his untimely death, the part of him that survives in his child, even if it is a child by another woman.
Although The Struggle for Spring was adapted from an American film called The Great Lie, it remains close to the Chinese heart. This virtuous wife-who undergoes all manner of suffering and unpleasantness to protect the fetus growing inside the belly of her husband's mistress and even stops her from having an abortion—is fundamentally Oriental in spirit, because of our deeply grounded traditional emphasis on the importance of preserving the family line.
In today's China, amid the intermingling of new and old currents of thought, western individualism is at a considerable advantage, so the continued existence of such models of feminine propriety, if they indeed exist, are in need of explanation. Even against the backdrop of the strict moralism of ancient times, this tangled psychological complex, with its excessive emphasis on self-sacrifice merits close scrutiny. Unfortunately, The Struggle for Spring is too superficial by half, seeing no call for explanation of the inner lives of either the wife or the mistress and taking all these questions basically for granted. The airy narrative style of director Li Pingqian is as winning as ever. Particularly gratifying to male audiences is the scene in which the wife and mistress sleep nestled in each other's arms, in perfect harmony and tender accord.
With a story as interesting as this one, The Struggle for Spring could easily have served as a sidelight to several momentous social issues. But this opportunity is passed over in silence. The Song of Meiniang is the same; blissfully unaware of its own progressive possibilities, it wends its insubstantial way down familiar roads instead, passing through territory known to us all: the tragedy of the abandoned wife. Meiniang is rushed from clichéd situation to clichéd situation, like a celebrity starlet hopping from one banquet to another. She stumbles in a rainstorm, kisses her child through a windowpane, gasps for breath in a thatched hovel, dies at long last in the arms of her repentant husband, and sings a love song to him on a lake in a final flashback of their life together. The film has every tried-and-true element of a successful romantic drama, but the remarkably poor lighting seriously detracts from the effect.
 In part because of the awful deficiency of the lighting, even the scenes of revelry look remarkably cold and bleak. The performance of Ma Ji, playing the madam of the brothel, suffers from the monotony of her sharp, cloying, and artificial laughter. Yan Jun, known for his villains, is fluent and effective in a straight role. Wang Xichun is not yet able to cast off completely the restrictions imposed on her by her training in Peking opera, while Zang Yinqiu steals several scenes with a brilliantly satirical portrait of an elementary school principal-the scenes that one can make out in spite of the poor lighting.
Nancy Chen tends toward the schoolgirlishly effusive in her portrayal of the heroic wife in The Struggle for Spring.' Bai Guang is limited by her lines and comes off as an unusually earnest vamp as she thrusts her glass at us over and over again, always with the same admonition: "Drink up! Drink up!"3 She attempts to break up the monotony with flashes from her lovely eyes, but even though she is such an expert "optometrist," these efforts seem somewhat forced.
2Nancy Chan (or Chen Yunshang) was one of the most celebrated stars of the wartime Chinese cinema. Originally from Hong Kong, she was catapulted to fame in Shanghai for her gender-bending performance as Mulan in the 1939 blockbuster Mulan Joins the Army.
3Bai Guang came to prominence as an actress, singer, and celebrity during the occupation period of 5945 to 1945 and was pigeonholed as a vamp in both her public roles and private life.