Schooling at the Silver Palace

NOT LONG AGO, I saw two highly educational films, New Life and The Fisher Girl.' (The latter does not necessarily fit neatly into the category of educational film, but it may well contribute to our understanding of the attitudes of Chinese people toward education.) Having benefited from their instruction, I cannot help writing out some of what I learned for everyone's reference.
New Life deals with the demoralization of rural innocence in the big city-a timeless theme. Three Modern. Girls and Humanity, two films from seven or eight years ago, also covered similar themes, and like New Life they showed a country boy studying in the metropolis as a typical example. Chinese films at present show a tendency to excavate favored topics from the films of the 1930s. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 1930s was a period of intellectual vigor, despite its touchiness, its bigotry, and the annoying monotony of its grandiloquent western-style "examination essays." The
'This essay was originally published as a film review in the English-language journal The XXth Century and subsequently rewritten and expanded in Chinese. See Eileen Chang, "China: Educating the Family," The XXth Century 4, no. 4 (April 1943). The Chinese title of the essay, "Yingong jiuxue ji," seems to be a parody of the title of one of the most popular pedagogical novels of the first half of the twentieth century, Bao Tianxiao's Xin'er jiuxue ji (The schooling of Xin'er), which was an adaptation of a didactic and nationalistic Italian story for children, Edmondo de Amicis's Heart (Cuore).

 anxious and slapdash mood of that era has passed us by, but some of the worthier of its literary and cinematic themes have survived.
Although New Life is designed to "expound the spirit of education and guide the young away from temptation"-to quote the advertisements-the filmmakers seemed to have been distrustful of the degree to which audiences would interest themselves in this mission. They have compromised by exaggerating the "temptations" and doing their best to simplify the "guidance." You can't really blame them, and there are precedents for such an approach. In America, a faction of educators called Revivalists hold public confessionals after Sunday services in which people expound at great length on their own past sins. The speaker describes his life of villainy and debauchery; the worse the sins, the better the story, and the clearer the contrast with one's present virtue and the happiness of having been saved. In the backward and out-of-the-way American hamlets where such practices are common, they don't have cabarets with bare-legged chorines; these vivid, earthy, and joyous stories of repentance are the only source of amusement.
New Life cannot pretend to that quality of vividness. It lacks a sense of reality, in part because of sheer economics. It's not that the producers weren't willing to spend enough money. The problem is that the film itself seems muddled about what things really cost. With the six hundred dollars his parents have given him for books, this unfilial son somehow contrives to live in luxury in a semidetached mansion with servants, perpetual parties, and a steady stream of girlfriends to keep him entertained. A gold-digging society girl agrees to marry him on the strength of the vast sum of money he is able to drum up for this purpose: two thousand dollars. These would have been fabulously optimistic calculations even by the standards of ten years ago.
The male protagonist turns over a new leaf and reforms himself but of what exactly does his remarkable reformation consist? New Life makes a courageous if rather messy attempt to grapple with this question. To be fair, it is specific on this score, whereas earlier films of its ilk provide only a vague feeling of renewal not unlike that of a New Year's resolution. New Life introduces us to the most ideal of all modern girls (played by Wang Danfeng), who befriends the hero for the sole purpose of providing mutual assistance in the arduous course of their studies. When he wants to take the relationship a step further, she refuses his love on the grounds that the times will no longer allow for frivolities such as romance. After graduation, she moves to a school in the interior to take up a position as an extremely decorative dean of students, with a big butterfly bow in her hair. Moved by her example, the protagonist joins a group of colonists who venture forth to
 reclaim the barren wastes of the borderlands. This move is completely unpremeditated and seems to be prompted by momentary inspiration, a poetic longing, or some impulse bordering on escapism. Why is it that he cannot redeem his sins in the same place in which they were committed? Are there no useful tasks for a strong, capable, and well-educated young man to undertake in our immediate surroundings? To insist that he travel to a "land far, far away" seems distinctly unpragmatic.
New Life also puts forward another proposition meriting serious discussion: is elementary education for the masses a more pressing need than advanced studies for the privileged few? The protagonist's father refuses to help a neighbor's child through primary school because he needs to save every penny to be able to afford to send his own son to college. Disappointed by his son's misdemeanors, however, he turns away from his own family and sets up a school for the benefit of the children of the entire village. Here, we may note an as-yet-veiled disapproval of the modern university on the part of the filmmakers, which emerges even more clearly in an attack on the contaminating miasma of corruption enveloping such institutions.
If we want to see a treatise on the meaning of education in The Fisher Girl, we run into a dead end, because the film has chosen an art student as its hero. Western art in China has from the very start been a plaything of leisured dilettantes. Almost all professional painters work in traditional Chinese styles. The hero immediately alienates his audience (at least any audience with a modicum of sense) when he naively imagines it possible to earn a living for a family with his two rather off-puttingly respectable nudes.
The maker of The Fisher Girl has presumably never seen a live fish, except for the kind that swims inside a bowl, but he tells the story with a rare sweetness and facility. There are some truly remarkable touches that, whether wittingly or not, illuminate the Chinese nature. For example, when the fisher girl apologizes to the art student for being unworthy of his lofty attentions, he replies, with some heat: "I don't like educated women." And yet, despite his Rousseauesque admiration for this child of nature, he cannot resist the temptation to teach her Chinese characters. In the past, Chinese scholars cultivated just such a hobby, teaching their concubines to read. Actually, to teach one's wife to read was acceptable as well, as long as she was pretty, but this sort of charming and elegant romantic occupation was normally reserved for later in one's life. In the leisurely days of retired life, a scholar could take on a "red-sleeved" young thing as a disciple to add savor to his sunset years. For these particular purposes, a regular wife would clearly be unsuitable.
 Literati in ancient times only rarely had the opportunity to teach female students, which is why Yuan Mei's Suiyuan is regarded with such admiration and envy and why Zheng Kangcheng, out of extreme boredom, made his maids double as students.2 Things are different today, of course, but several thousand years of sentimental education cannot be altered as easily as that, and we can see traces of the old ways wherever we care to look. Nowadays, Chinese people have agreed to the proposition that their women should be educated, but they prefer to educate their wives themselves, either directly or indirectly. In popular novels, a man who pays to have a poor girl go to school has irrevocably committed himself to marrying her, no matter how firmly he may insist that he only wants to help her fulfill her dreams or how loudly he emphasizes her educational potential. The "View Matrimony" advertisements in the personals often include the phrase "willing to subsidize tuition."
The protagonist of The Fisher Girl is only too happy to teach his charge, and she is educated purely for the pleasure of her tutor. The education the art student receives is of no use to him. He has a falling out with his father on account of the fisher girl, tries to make a living on his own, and is unable to do so. Luckily, a wealthy young woman who is enamored with him saves the day but proceeds to use a thousand and one stratagems to poison his relationship with the fisher girl. At the last moment, this enchanting buyer of souls has an attack of conscience, the two lovers are reunited, and the art student uses the wealthy woman's money to hire a fancy bridal carriage for the fisher girl. This movement from tragedy to comedy depends entirely on the not altogether reliable conscience of the rich girl-and for this reason the tragedy of The Fisher Girl is that much more profound.

'Yuan Mei (1716-1798) was a prolific and eccentric Qing poet and literary critic. His residence and garden, dubbed the Suiyuan, was populated in part by young women whom Yuan, in rather unconventional fashion, had taken on as his students. Zheng Kangcheng (also known as Zheng Xuan) was a scholar of the Eastern Han period.