Some Thoughts on Tsui Hark, and an Epitaph for the Alternativeness of Hong Kong Cinema
by Andrew Grossman

1.
There has been a tendency-one borne of a mixture of condescension and distance-among both mainstream and academic critics to characterize the American cult fascination with the Hong Kong new wave as a gloriously inept accident, the spontaneous emergence of a shady social network of witless cinematic tourists hedonistically wading their way through a foreign culture with nary a political thought in their heads. While this cult movement has certainly tended towards the violent and visceral aspects of the HK new wave, the characterization of cultists as philistines, or as a random assemblage of jaded dilettantes and juvenile fanatics, is not only simplistic, but is by and large a judgment made by the enfranchised of the disenfranchised, those powerless spectators such as myself who are not in a position to influence which films do and do not receive wide distribution. This stereotypical perception of those who in futility resist cultural assimilation may further point out the greatest problem we face in all kinds of criticism: the individual spectator whose political and psychological needs are not fulfilled by doctrinaire postcolonialism, postmodernism, or whatever happens to be the methodology of the decade, is left shivering in the cold, in the vacuum of spectatorship without the warm insulation of an all-purpose theory, simply striving to exist as an individual political entity in a time when the mainstreaming of postmodernism has rendered naive the viability of political action. From the standpoint of sociology, I do accept that there is no such thing as a "self"-but at least leave for that nonexistent self some vagrant scraps of existent agency. As the familiar quotation goes, the only difference between a religion and a cult is that a cult has no political power, and at this point, I am still part of a cult.

So here I am obliged to say that the films one consciously chooses to watch-and as we brave the media blitzkrieg that bloats each Hollywood nonevent, the self-consciousness of this choice anxiously escalates-become a de facto political decision even if they are not one inherently. This fact is now inescapable, and the reason why I refuse to spend money to watch Hollywood films. This has nothing to do with postmodernism, academic criticism, adolescent hipster posturing, or dilettantism. It is the recognition of the plain fact that the heartless media of my own culture are destroying me, and, though I am inevitably powerless to stop the process of destruction, I must look elsewhere-perhaps anywhere-for release and respite and, dare I say it, peace. Our fascination with Hong Kong cinema is in its form and premise not a unique phenomenon, however. The French new wave's love of classical Hollywood served more or less the same purpose for the Cahiers du Cinema critics, who saw in Hollywood's unabashed (yet, unlike today, still literate) generic energies an escape from the mildewed nobility of the Renoir generation. (So what does this prove? The obvious fact that every nonexistent self naively needs an existent other?) Just as the French new wavers championed Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann, so did we ten or so years ago look to Tsui Hark, for example, as proof of the viability of genre filmmaking. But now, according to the apparent eventuality of transnational exploitation, it seems we cannot escape Hong Kong films, as they currently undergo their Americanization as those falsely committed to an asylum would undergo a lobotomy. Schiller said that it is hunger and love that move the world, but then several years ago there was only hunger for the alternative we perceived in the Hong Kong new wave, a hunger that became indistinguishable from love. Now, in the absence of hunger, where the hardly obscure object of desire now exists in surfeit, my love of Hong Kong cinema threatens to dissipate. But such are the inevitable contingencies of a formalistically oppositional agenda, where love and hunger blindly fuse into a self-defeating, or even masturbatory, obsession. Yet what good obsession isn't masturbatory?

Indeed, as my search for alternative cinema was infected with the romanticism that infects all lost causes, it became a kind obsessive madness; but how else to redress the capitalist madness of Hollywood but with a reactive madness equal in degree but saner in quality? What struck me about the HK new wave was exactly its sanity, that nearly lost art of telling compact, economical, decently composed narratives in a minimum of time, artfully but unpretentiously, almost devoid of fat, unafraid of the sincere emotionalisms that Americans, frightened of their own emotional shadows, would defensively turn into safe ironies and winking self-referentialities. To put it another way, at its best the HK new wave legitimized the melodramatic impulse that the juvenile, self-satisfied ironies of contemporary American culture deny-the formulaic sanity of the melodramatic arc may be a conservative illusion, but, as far as illusions go, it is one that I seem to require.

Still, this romanticism of mine was not an internal pathology but a symptom of the greater pathology that is the hegemony of Hollywood. The upshot of this romanticism was that it could turn even the worst HK films into a political crusade, which became quite important when the films' political content was sorely lacking, as it often was. In the absence of subversive political content-and the downside of HK cinema's populism is that it generally offers little political content beyond banal humanism or reactionary nationalism, be it anti-West or anticommunist-the romanticism through which I viewed HK films became its own politic of resentment. Nietzsche said resentment was the greatest poison to the intellect-he was quite right, but, in the absence of an enlightening Zarathustra, how can we mortals recover the antidote? (No, please don't look to the cinema for a new Zarathustra-that is childish idiocy, not political cultism!)

So, although as an individual I was powerless to change anything about the way films are distributed, I could fantasize that I was not powerless, but for fleeting moments, when I watched the Hong Kong films that were once distributional contraband and are now bordering on Blockbuster mundanity (yet still dubbed, of course, as poorly as possible, to preserve our noble traditions of racism and xenophobia). I felt an odd rush of panic-perhaps even a Pavlovian salivation-each time the Cinema City or Film Workshop logos flashed their premonitions of bright things to come; when I see those logos now, I feel the nostalgia one feels for one's own misspent youth, a nostalgia from which I am only now beginning to alienate myself. That experience of viewing the world through the misty cataracts of ill-gotten bootleg videos, as the indistinct texts of the films became not what they were but what I imagined they could be if seen clearly, seemed to echo the words of the poet Konstantin Balmont: In every fugitive vision...I see whole worlds. Of course, the reflexively fugitive eye that squinted through the cataract of international film distribution became blinded entirely when Hong Kong directors, enticed by expensive technologies and budgets that would soon sour them, would journey West and leave in their wake a mothballed fleet of Mission Impossible 2's. Indeed, the wonderfully simple political pleasures (and here I should only speak of the illicitness of pleasures) of watching bootlegs-whereby the immoral excesses of Hollywood would no longer be subsidized by those who found something better-has been reduced by the belated mainstreaming of cult films of kinds, not just those from Hong Kong. While it may be taboo to say this, that the Hong Kong film industry nearly collapsed because of video piracy is not my concern-I will spill tears over many others in this world before I spill them over a highly corrupt, triad-fueled film industry (or any film industry, for that matter). But perhaps this is because, realizing all along that I have been powerless, I no longer believe in the cinema.

The political statement my romanticized cultism entailed, a statement articulated to no one in particular, was, in a boring paradox, potent only insofar as it was impotent-the moment someone listened to its message of alternativeness, the pleasure of alternativeness became no longer illicit. Now, as this former alternative settles on the fence of Hollywood assimilation, too many people are listening, straining their ears for a train that has already passed. A reactionary gesture against the American media culture that fifteen years ago ignored the Hong Kong new wave almost as furiously as it now serves it with a poisoned glance and overeager handshake, my romanticism was, as I have implied, self-pitying and decadent. I emphasize, however, that the value of this romanticism was not an orientalist value, as so many postcolonialists would too-easily have it, but the participation in a secret society of fruitless, wonderfully hopeless protest. Nevertheless, the deafening cries of orientalism continue to be more valid than ever, as the Taoist wireworks advanced by Kung Hu are plundered of their metaphysics to be commodified into the bubblegum sensibilities of preadolescent merchandizing, as Yuen Woo Ping is reduced from the eccentricities of The Miracle Fighters (1982) to advising Hollywood producers as to how they can Asiatically spice their children's films, or as the American video packaging for Lee Myung-Se's Nowhere to Hide (1999) proudly advertises "In the Tradition of John Woo" (a mantra of the damned if there ever were one), even though the "tradition" in question seems to be merely a code word for an orientalist hipsterism that was already passe five years ago. Would that Spanish, or Italian, or French, or Mexican, or Russian, or Thai films undistributed in the US came pre-equipped with English translations as do Hong Kong films, who knows what else might have been? Give me some very bad yet undistributed Russian films and I will sit through them more readily than American films I can rent down the street, just to make a point. And I would do it for years-forever, in fact, until I die.

So I still refuse to watch the rotten fruits that drop from the overgrown Hollywood vine, and will continue to do so, a personal struggle not of self-denying asceticism but of simple sanity, though it may necessitate that I miss a few good films along with the dross-but such are our Pyrrhic victories. This, however, is not a mere matter of aesthetic taste: how many god-awful Hong Kong films did I endure on eighth-generation bootlegs just to make the worthless point that my atheist soul couldn't be bought with Hollywood bombast? Here, it is the word bought that becomes crucial. The ultimate problem may be that the only way to resist complicity in the indulgent capitalism of all mainstream filmmaking (yes, HK films reluctantly included-but I will come to that later) is to see films without having to pay to see them-in other words, to either be a bootlegger, a subversive yet democratic pursuit potentially open to all, or a professional critic, an elitist occupation of closed, hierarchical societies. In fact, one might well say that it is the mainstream critic's elitist sense of enfranchised entitlement that fosters the apolitical dilettantism of which disenfranchised yet democratic cultists are often falsely accused. (When I say "democratic," I don't mean the "democracy" of the American oligarchy, which is obviously the source of our problem-remember that Lenin revolutionarily used the word "democracy," too.) That the social networks of the cinematic underground and the overground have now lightly intersected and mutually influenced one another is a subject for further investigation-in ten years, maybe we'll see if the hierarchies have changed their orders.

We knew all too well, of course, what would happen when Hong Kong directors came to America to seek their postcolonial fortunes-their films offered few surprises. How I-and I presume voiceless others-wanted to rise up, to shout a clarion warning, not for the sake of the national integrity of HK filmmakers for the futile sake of oppositional politics; naturally, I was saddened when even Tsui Hark became cruelly implicated in the folk psychosis called Hollywood. This is not to say Tsui didn't try-he did the best anyone could have under the circumstances. Yet the technology-for-its-own-sake filmmaking of a Double Team (1997) or Knockoff (1998) reveals nakedly the Faustian bargain-wherever Tsui's camera swirls, and no matter how violently, it reveals only its own internal struggle to erect out of style a substance all-too-predictably missing from Hollywood scripts. (On the other hand, as the ethos of Hollywoodism floats across oceans like an airborne illness, it is also true that recent HK films have fallen victim to the same kind of scriptwriting.) So back to Hong Kong goes Tsui Hark, and we wait still for John Woo, Sammo Hung, and whoever else has not been destroyed. (Jackie Chan is a unique exception-he has always embraced Westernization regardless of 1997, and after going "multilingual" there is little qualitative difference between his American and HK productions.) Now back in HK with Time and Tide (2000), whose anarchic sloppiness and technological mania seem to affront the well-constructed modesty of Tsui's 1980's films, the revolutionary (literally and figuratively) swirl of Tsui's camera seems not so much a display of technology but a belated release of the suppressed anger and frustration Tsui must have accumulated in America. But I didn't feel sorry for Tsui Hark-he had a career behind him, and another still ahead, and he would do fine. But would I? I am not saying Tsui has an obligation to me or anyone else-an artist's only obligation is to him or her (nonexistent) self. Similarly, however, my obligations can only be to myself, and I can fantastically claim to exist only so long as I have my obligations.

I have characterized the romanticism of my cult protest as illusory because, of course, it attempts to neatly sweep under the rug the reality that Hong Kong's capitalism is as cutthroat as America's. But the joy of HK cinema is its perhaps unsettling illustration that charm and capitalist greed are not mutually exclusive. What Tsui Hark-more than any other exponent of the HK new wave-has done is to demonstrate to a post-Spielberg/Lucas world that cinematic spectacle can be rescued from oppressive economic excess, that, somehow, capitalist filmmaking can seem benign, nurturing, perhaps even benevolent. The arguments of postcolonialism and orientalism have tried to obscure the fact Americans, too, suffer under the crushing weight of Hollywood, are suffocated by its charmlessness, insulted by its wastefulness, driven to masochism by its oligarchy. (Yet who among us is terroristic enough to do anything about it?) It was against the backdrop of this suffering that the tightness of Tsui's narratives, and the consistent economy of his borderline expressionist art direction, created the impression of an anti-indulgent, anti-realist capitalism that, in another illusion, seemed antithetical to the Hollywood guilt that comes with wondering how many under-inflated Somalian children could have been nourished with the price of each over-inflated Schwarzeneggerian explosion. For myself, I imagined an impossible hedonistic calculus whereby capitalist guilt and cinematic pleasure stood in inverse proportion. The less guilt I experienced as a co-conspirator in the material costs of the cinema, the more pleasure I allowed myself. In a sense, of course, this makes me a hypocrite-I wanted excitement, not minimalism, but I just didn't want to subsidize it.

That Tsui apotheosizes the best aspects of populist filmmaking says more about the general status of an industry than it does about populism itself, however. HK cinema in the 1980's produced many entirely decent films not out of auteurism but as a result of a happy convergence of talent and an overall industrial health; journeyman filmmakers could make good films on the basis of this overall health alone. Therefore, the question becomes "How do we consistently replicate the conditions under which populism can be made into a positive influence-or are the conditions unforeseeable and at the mercy of uncontrollable forces?" We should remember that the three most prolific film industries in the world-those of India, the United States, and Hong Kong-are prolific mainly because the monies generated by their generic populisms substitute for governmental apathy in the arts. The main reason the art cinemas of France and Germany, for example, were able to flourish is because they were the results of socialist governments subsidizing films that popular audiences would have little interest in seeing. This was demonstrated quite clearly when in the early 1980's the West German government found it no longer feasible to subsidize many of their artists, and formerly state-funded auteurs such as Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, unable to secure domestic financing, became exiles embarking on increasingly nomadic co-productions. For Tsui and other HK directors, nomadism was an eventuality mainly only for A-list talent-yet, with HK films as popular in Europe as they are in the U.S., it has puzzled me why Tsui and others didn't seek the probable artistic freedom of European financing instead of the artistic straightjackets of Hollywood. Maggie Cheung seems to be the only major HK film artist who resisted America in favor of, in her case, France. While Western Europe is obviously no less prone to orientalism than the U.S., who knows what might have been if Tsui or John Woo had spent the last five years in Europe? It only seems like an eventuality that HK directors should come to Hollywood, as if HK and America are the two magnetic poles to which everything must be attracted. But no one is twisting the arms of HK filmmakers-not me, and not the Mainland Chinese-because there are, in fact, other countries on this planet.

2.

Some Western and Hong Kong critics have lamented Tsui Hark's premature abandonment of the art film for the commercial cinema, though after the three financial failures that were The Butterfly Murders (1979), We're Going to Eat You (1980), and Don't Play with Fire (1980), it would seem more appropriate for critics, if they really do believe in Tsui's early films, to criticize Hong Kong audiences for being philistines (that is really the point, is it not?). The "problem" of Tsui's early career is taken as a moralizing allegory for the gulf between the first, fleeting, more experimental part of the new wave and the longer-lived, commercialized second, as the liberal social realism of Allen Fong's Father and Son (1981) and Ann Hui's Story of Woo Viet (1981) crumbled under the greater economic viability offered by Cinema City and Tsui's own Film Workshop, whose brand names guaranteed a gloss analogous to that of Warner Brothers or MGM in the 1930's. Yet the reductive distinction drawn between Tsui's art film beginnings and his rise to populism skirts the fact that Tsui's first three films, though advancing new technologies of cinematography and editing, are already generically derived from populist genres: the swordplay film, the cannibal-horror film, and the urban action film, respectively. Tsui's descent (or ascent) to populism is, I would suggest, the best thing that could have happened to him: instead of using arty cinematic technique to conceal his genre origins, his later films exploit these techniques to accentuate them. This isn't to say there isn't something more exciting about his feverish beginnings-yet it is not so much abstract artistry but the play on populist genres that most informs even Tsui's earliest works. For example, We're Going to Eat You plays on familiar 1970's rural cannibal-horror themes such that the threat of cannibalism becomes not the primitively incestuous id that threatens the bourgeoisie of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or The Hills Have Eyes (1977), nor the Third World id that consumes the imperialist Caucasian ego of "white man's burden" adventures such as Man From Deep River (1972) or Jungle Holocaust (1977), but rather, for those who take We're Going as a critique of communism, a corrupt, insane superego, devouring the autonomous yet hapless individual. Nevertheless, when it comes to Don't Play with Fire, Tsui's most "political" film, I cannot help but think that even this film's reputation rests on its generic qualities-if it weren't slickly violent and gory, would people still like it? In retrospect, the film's reactionary politics are marred by one-dimensional xenophobia and even unapologetic homophobia, and, hardly the nihilist film it is often made out to be, its icy moralizing on urban social problems seems to me rather conservative. Yet because we can in principle sympathize with its well-known censorship problems, the film becomes emboldened with political values beyond its text-for many, Don't Play with Fire comes to symbolize what Hong Kong cinema might have been if it were not for its own self-censoring populism. But because I am not fully convinced of the depth of the film's politics, I believe this symbolism may have been either overstated or overestimated.

But I should say something specific about Tsui Hark thematically, so I will suggest one thing: because the transnational fate that Hong Kong directors have so diligently fulfilled has provided an overly convenient template for postmodernist interpretations, we should step back for a moment before branding Tsui with the already-peeling label of postmodernism. Of all of Tsui's motifs, it may be his interest in transvestism that seems most receptive to postmodern interpretation. But while Tsui's fascination with (female) transvestism is familiar territory, it has been difficult to appreciate-while its very fact may incite some to cry postmodernism, what Tsui usually does with transvestism seems, at least to me, more or less traditional, even quasi-Confucian. (We should also keep in mind that the common Cantonese term for transvestite, yam yiu, literally translates as "human monster," a somewhat less-than-utopian view of hybridity!) Tsui raises boundaries only to avoid crossing them, points out "postmodern" problems only to refuse postmodern responses, and within an auteurist whirligig of gender-bending substitutes active sexuality with alternating categories of gender that stubbornly refuse to be about the sexual transformations to which we often assume gender transformations must be tantamount. Simply, Tsui's particular use of transvestism erases sexuality from contentions of gender identity.

With respect to the period costume films that followed from Swordsman (1990), Tsui's trademark "strong women" had themselves transformed from willful, desirous individuals-the world of Shanghai Blues (1984) or the image of a sexualized yet still lethal Anita Mui in A Better Tomorrow 3 (1989)-to female transvestites who, while updating tropes of theatrical Chinese transvestism, must suppress their sexual agencies as long as they suppress their genders. However, we need to first distinguish the diegetic or temporary transvestism of Tsui's post-Swordsman costume films from the extradiegetic theatrical transvestite traditions from which Tsui takes his cues. Within the theatrical Cantonese transvestism practiced by opera actresses such as Yam Kim-fei, cross-dressing occurs offstage, whereupon the audience enters into an artistic contract in which it should accept the gender that is performed apart from the biological gender of the performer. While on the surface this may seem like a "proto-postmodern" version of Judith Butler's idea of performativity, there is a difference in their effects. Whereas Butlerian queer theory posits an endless series of parodies that continually decenter subjectivity (including, presumably, the subjectivity of queer theory itself), performances such as Yam Kim-fei's theoretically have a rational and self-contained artistic goal that controls a centered audience's suspension of disbelief, as the convincingness of the transvestite performance is governed by the Aristotelian theatrical contract into which the audience enters. Practically, of course, there may be some "spillover" from the stage into real life-Shu Kei's film Hu-du-Men (1996) nicely captures this, and further frames old transvestite traditions within modern notions of lesbian identity to argue that the sexual transfigurations we call a symptom of postmodernism have existed centuries before the term was ever coined.

Tsui's gender-bending, however, refuses these sexual transformations, regardless of whether one wants to characterize them as premodern in the manner of Yam Kim-fei or postmodern in the manner of Butler. Since Swordsman (1990), Tsui's transvestism has always been of the gamy diegetic variety, in which cross-dressing occurs "onstage," in full knowledge of the audience, and only to fulfill the demands of the plot. Secondly, although Tsui's use of transvestism does, of course, give rise to sexual confusions in the narratives, transsexual implications are never acted upon, cross-dressed characters scrupulously avoid sex, and gender confusions are generally sorted out into heteronormativity in the end. (On one level, this is not unlike Shakespeare's resolutions; on the other hand, because boys played the female parts in the Elizabethan theater, Shakespeare had another level of complexity to play with-a meta-transvestism.) Therefore, whatever strength Maggie Cheung in Dragon Inn (1992) or Charlie Yeung in The Lovers (1994) wields turns on the convincing masculinity of their performances, and even though, as some might argue, their parodies of gender strive to subvert gender norms, the eventual unmasking of their genders only confirms male hegemony. While in drag, Tsui's women cannot be sexually active-their strength and their sexual agency are inversely proportional, and they must alternate between the two, forever unable to experience both social power (coded as male) and active sexuality (coded as female) simultaneously. This is complicated to a second degree by Tsui's tendency to avoid dealing with sexuality directly; complementing the asexual "female men" who disguise as martial heroes, Tsui's conventional period costume films (excepting The Blade [1996]) often feature a pattern of "chaste men." In addition to the beleaguered monk of Green Snake (1993), let's not forget that for his Once Upon a Time in China series, Tsui rewrote history to make Wong Fei Hung an eternally virginal hero instead of the married man he historically was. In this context, it is notable that the mysterious "snake drag" of Green Snake (1993), Tsui's sexiest film, suggests that what hides beneath human exteriors is not merely the sexuality (the natural) suggested by transvestite drag, but something terrifyingly otherworldly (the supernatural).

Tsui's transvestism is further problematized by his use of exclusively female transvestites. (Peking Opera Blues [1986] may seem an exception, but that film's male transvestism is mostly incidental, limited to trivial characters, and occurs within the exceptional context of actual opera.) This seems to suggest that Tsui's gender confusion is, so to speak, a one-way street. While static masculinity is fixed at the far end of the spectrum, femininity unstably slides back and forth on a continuum that polarizes female sex and male power, and whatever strength the female acquires is measured in terms of her gravitation towards polar maleness. But though the strengths of Tsui's cross-dressed women hinge on their masculinity, their heterosexuality is never in doubt; in other words, they are still transfixed by the gender binaries that inform traditional Confucian masculinism. So Tsui's use of female transvestism, then, is much closer to the tradition of cross-dressed Chang Pei Pei in Chang Cheh's Golden Swallow (1968), who immediately lets down her hair, both figuratively and literally, once she and Jimmy Wang Yu have expressed their love for one another, or Ivy Ling Po in Yueh Feng's Lady General Hua-Mulan (1964), who must resume her role as a Confucianistically dutiful daughter as soon as her temporary male role is fulfilled. Mainland feminist scholar Wang Zheng has characterized the masculinist underpinnings of this kind of gender-switching as symptoms of what she terms the "Mulan subject position," a phenomenon common in the May Fourth New Culture movement, in which women who sought independence from male dynastic oppression were (ironically) inspired to behave like male revolutionaries-what Wang Zheng sees as the tacit masculine bias of much of May Fourth humanism. (This masculinism, of course, was also a tenet of Maoism, which masculinized women while demonizing them if their masculinity appeared too "lesbian.") In Tsui's films, this Mulan-ism conspires to create a kind of asexual crypto-feminism that presents women as dazzlingly charismatic yet mysterious figures whose secret is their struggle to maintain the mystique of their biological genders while they suppress their (hetero)sexual desires.

Stanley Kwan, interviewing Tsui Hark in his documentary Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1996), expresses his concern over what he perceives as latent homophobia in the "one-way" transvestism of Tsui's The Lovers (1994), wherein the two would-be lovers tentatively describe homosexuality as "unreal" while simultaneously experiencing the incipience of their heterosexual awakening under homosexual (or transvestite) pretenses. While Tsui, of course, says he never intended the scene to be homophobic, in his interview with Kwan he only explains his total interest in transvestism by discussing his personal fascination with Lin Ching-hsia, describing her almost as a kind of female alter ego. In his article "Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema," (2000) director Evans Chan, whose own fascinating Crossings (1994) uses the ambisexuality of the transvestite as a symbol of sexual cum national transformation, redresses Kwan's argument:

"...[Kwan's film] Yin and Yang favors a gay reading of Chinese cinema that tends to edge out other equally valid interpretations. For example, the famous butterfly lovers legend, which tells of a Chinese Yentl who cross-dresses as a man to attend school and falls in love with a schoolmate, is viewed exclusively as a repressed gay romance, at the expense of its profoundly feminist implications."

Chan is perhaps correct to point out that Kwan's subjectively gay reading obscures the fact that the Chinese transvestite tradition Tsui is exploiting-and for that matter, the butterfly lovers legend itself-has little to do with modern notions of homosexual identity. (The temptation to conflate traditionally performed transvestism with modern notions of same-sex desire is, however, not without its political appeal, and has informed films such as Hu-du-Men and Zhang Yuan's annoyingly masochistic East Palace, West Palace [1996]. What these films do not address, however, is the difference between transsexual performances and the seemingly essentialist homosexualites of their characters.) Additionally, although in the interview Tsui himself makes no mention of this, I do think there is more than a hint of irony in the discussion of the "real" in The Lovers, as Charlie Yeung's character sarcastically asks "So that is what is called real?" (my emphasis) when her love interest suggests that only heterosexuality should be called "real," a position which would further suggest that the "unreality" of transvestite performances needs to be "realized"-become unmasked-in the form of legitimated heterosexuality. Nevertheless, we shouldn't forget that in The Lovers-as in so many diegetic drag movies-the beginnings of heterosexual desire are activated only when the male views the female as a male. More to the point, however, I am not sure exactly what are the feminist implications of The Lovers-or the "strong women" of Tsui's post-Swordsman period films in general-when their crypto-feminism is bounded by and contingent upon a conventionalized Mulan-ism that suppresses any kind of sexuality until the woman can finally be unmasked as a heterosexual. Postmodernism claims there is no essential identity to unmask at all, and the theatrical performances of Yam Kim-fei place identity on a simultaneously conscious and unconscious stage of artistic desire. But Tsui's use of exclusively female transvestism posits female identity as a continuous state of becoming, as a constant set of games, ruses, and ploys, and maleness as an essential being, the pole against which feminine becoming is measured.

It may be the case that Tsui is in fact only interested in gender to the exclusion of sexuality-even in his early "art" films, Tsui preferred the sensuality of violence over the sensuality of sex. Nevertheless, Tsui, however consciously or unconsciously, tried to ingeniously dig his way out of the masculinist predicament in the form of Lin Ching-hsia's "Asia the Invincible" in Swordsman 2-3 (1992-3). A towering figure of Chinese nationalism, "Asia" is effectively a transvestite mise en abyme, as actress Lin Ching-hsia plays a man who is gradually turning into a woman. On one level, Asia is an extradiegetic transsexual who, in the theatrically "offstage" spaces between the first and second installments of the film, has magically transformed from male to female; on another level, this "transsexual" is played by a female actress who diegetically represents female-to-male transsexuality with the entirely conventional male drag we have already associated not with "postmodern" transsexual hybridity but with asexual Mulan-ism. Thus, "Asia" (i.e. China) deals firmly with the arrogant European imperialists of Swordsman 2-3 by presenting itself as violently and conventionally masculine on the outside, while hiding its sexual cum political identity crisis on the inside, as the transvestite/eunuch traditions the series draws upon literally become an inspirationally nationalist weapon against imperialism. This internal identity crisis-the sexuality the Mulan woman must suppress to gain power-further represents China's own insecurity in the face of modernity, as it must choose between nativist traditions (coded, in a self-orientalizing move, as the secret femininity of Asia's transsexuality) and modern Western progress (the conventional masculine-aggressive drag). Yet because the whole of this internal struggle is already framed within the overarching Chinese transvestite tradition, Asia's mind has, in effect, already been made up, and she/he/it is predestined to choose nationalism. Furthermore, unlike the Mulan woman, Asia's diegetic gender transformation is from male to female, even though enacted by a female actor. Politics aside, because the intricacies of the mise en abyme structure complicate the privileging of masculinity over femininity, it does at first seem that Tsui has managed to solve the problem of masculinism without, amazingly, ever resorting to issues of sexuality.

But Tsui reneges on his possibilities as soon as he creates them by doing something decidedly non-postmodern (and by all accounts quite traditional) with the introduction of Asia's female consort in Swordsman 2, who in the darkness substitutes for Asia when she/he/it is to sleep with Jet Li. When fighting imperialists, Asia's masculinity takes precedence; when dealing with the possibility of having sex with Jet Li, however, Asia is disturbingly reminded of his/her/its hidden feminine sexualiity, basically the same sexuality the May Fourth Mulan woman must suppress in order to orchestrate the modern technological progress of masculinist Western humanism. So why does Asia decide not to sleep with Jet Li's character, and instead find it more enjoyable to sadistically taunt him at the end of the film not with the more disturbing question of what it was he slept with on that fateful night, but merely the question of whom he slept with? While we can describe Lin Ching-hsia's performance as following in the transvestite tradition, in the text of the film her character is essentially a eunuch, and not a transsexual, though the metaphysics of the film tend to conflate the two categories. (Here, the Mulan-ism of Tsui's strong woman collides with the tradition of the eunuch, who exchanges his sexuality for supernatural energies.) As Asia transforms from a eunuch at the end of Swordsman 1 to an emergent female in Swordsman 2, he/she/it acquires a female voice and manner but-as far as I can tell-no female sexual organs. For all of her/his/its nationalist power, Asia also thus becomes a pitiable masochist, not the diabolical, undefeatable eunuch of King Hu's Dragon Inn (1966), but a loner whose love of country becomes a bitter substitute for a simultaneous condition of sexual impotence and frigidity. With the introduction of the character of Asia's female consort, Tsui can displace the unformed, nascent, yet still unfortunate effeminacy of Asia's monstrous transsexuality into the safely isolated femininity of an actual heterosexual woman whose passive sexual organs prevent her from making claims to political power.

Thus, no matter how multilayered is this gender ruse, it nevertheless does it best to preserve heterosexual norms, leaving Jet Li's straightness unbent, while concealing Asia's identity crisis, which if exposed would seem a sign of effeminate weakness to imperialists. At the climax of Swordsman 2, one of the heroes even jokes that Asia wishes to seduce both men and women-but the seduction is the secret of China's closeted insecurity, its equation of a self-orientalizing femininity with a faltering nationalism that in the disastrous wake of the Opium War must be kept hidden. Asia may be the bold reincarnation of this nationalist impulse, but she/he/it is a straw woman hiding inside of a straw man, an image realized almost literally when in Swordsman 3 Asia hides within the empty shell of an imposingly masculine suit of Japanese armor. The keeping of the secret of Asia's "asexual transsexuality" becomes tantamount to he/she/its maintaining political sovereignty: the character of "Asia" cannot be penetrated sexually just as the continent of Asia should not be penetrated politically or nationally. Therefore, although the transvestite mise-en-abyme of the performance and character of "Asia" seems to be an exception to Mulan-ism, Swordsman 2 and 3's anxiety over the political allegory of its own transsexuality prevents it from crossing the border of heteronormativity.

Probably no filmmaker in history has ever created as complex a gender ruse as the character of "Asia." Still, in a sense, Asia is not quite as nationalist as she/he/it may appear, since his/her/its denial of the "sex" in "transsexual" occurs against the grain of much of Chinese transvestite tradition. Giving Tsui the benefit of the doubt, we may see Asia's sexual anxiety as a symptom of both Western imperialism and the 19th century Western homophobia that China overanxiously adopted in its race to keep pace with 20th century modernity. It is thus little surprise why Western (or American) culture is both loved and hated in the same breath, and, in the case of Tsui's Once Upon a Time in China (1991), more hated than loved, even as Wong Fei Hung must sheepishly concede the benefits of Western technology when visiting a modern factory. As an American though, I understand the consequences of American technology from the opposite end of the spectrum: while I, too, hate America more than I love it, I know it is far too great and too forbidding to successfully insurrect. Thus, I can only have my fantasies-and for better or worse I have chosen films-as my hopeless form of resistance seeks a hopeful form of resistance to rescue it.

(originally published in 2001 for the occasion of Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong: A Tsui Hark Retrospective).

ANDREW GROSSMAN has, for better or worse, spent half his life's waking hours watching films. He is the editor and co-author of Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade (Harrington Park Press, USA, 2000).