ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

〈講演会報告〉〈Lecture〉

Autumn Hearts
Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” in*

Rey Chow

Little Hueyin and her grandfather taking a nap
together in a ﬂashback in(Copyright Cos Group / Central Motion Pictures, 1990)

Few preoccupations are as banal or as popular as the exploration of the individual self. If
this cultural thematic of the self continues to hold a certain fascination for us, it is probably lessbecause of its theoretical inexhaustibility than because of its associative open‑endedness, the factthat it can be inserted into virtually any type of representational situation without any perceived
loss of relevance. The self, as such, has often been discussed in modern and contemporary
Chinese literature and culture, which in the twentieth century alone have witnessed multifarious
examples of autobiography in fictional as well as nonfictional writings. In a world still largely
dominated by the interests of heterosexual kinship bonds and thus, ultimately, by male supremacy,
the emergence of the self as a problematic is often closely aﬃned with cultural experiences ofmarginalization and subordination such as those of women.1 In this chapter, as part of a readingof Hong Kong director Ann Huiʼs ﬁlm(1990), Iʼd like to approachthe question of exploring the self̶clichéd as it may indeed seem to be̶from several perspectives.
First, returning to an early moment of modern Chinese womenʼs writing, I will show how
processes of self-reflection are culturally specific phenomena, often constructed with recurrent
formal codes̶that is, fundamental features of presentation that allow a text to become intelligible
in a certain way. The history of the gradual visibility and agency accorded women in modernity,* Rey Chowʼs lecture was based upon her argument in Chapter 4 from her recent book,(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),
which is reproduced here with the permission of Columbia University Press. We are grateful for the generosity andcooperation shown by Rey Chow and Columbia University Press for our journal.

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Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” inthen, is in many ways a history of the progressive molding and remolding of the abstraction I willcall “psychic interiority.” Second, it would be interesting to see how the formal codes and theirvariables are adapted and elaborated in diﬀerent media̶in ﬁlm, for instance, as opposed to writing. How does ﬁlm at once enrich and transform the terms in which this interiority is imagined?
Finally, it is necessary to evaluate, however speculatively, the continued relation between thepresentation of such feminine psychic interiority and the social strictures they are intended tocounter.
INVENTING “PSYCHIC INTERIORITY”: SOME BASIC CODES
In a short ﬁctional piece, “Xifeng” (West wind), ﬁrst published in 1936, the well‑known author
Bing Xin tells the story of a middle‑aged womanʼs chance reunion with the intimate male friend
she rejected ten years before in order to pursue her career.2 An accomplished educator, Qiuxin
is on her way to deliver a lecture entitled “The Two Major Issues for Women: Career andMarriage.” Recalling her youthful decision to turn down the oﬀer of marriage from Yuan, Qiuxin
notices, with a mild sadness, that it is late autumn. This allusion to the season is a suggestion
both of her age and of her state of mind, which is clearly fatigued and lonely.3 Unexpectedly,
Qiuxin runs into Yuan, who happens to be traveling to the same destination. The two renew theirfriendship and keep each other company on the rest of their journey, ﬁrst on the train and thenon a boat.
We are soon introduced into a process of quiet observation and self‑reﬂection. Qiuxin thinks
that, unlike herself, Yuan, now married with two children, does not seem to have changed. He
looks as handsome as ever and seems content with his life. This wonderfully positive ability toremain untouched by time, readily attributed to the other, turns simultaneously into a negativeand inferior self‑concept, one that is then reprojected outward onto her own aging appearance:“Looking into the mirror under the light, she saw the dust in her hair, the black circles aroundher eyes, and the fatigue and pallor on her face. ʻIʼm not what I used to be anymore.ʼ She stoodnumbly for a while. The bell for dinner startled her. She quickly changed and washed her face,
and for the ﬁrst time in years, put on a little rouge” (“Xifeng” 300).
The hypersensitivity to the passing of time and her own physical deterioration is accompanied
by a mounting sense of regret: did she make a mistake those many years ago? Qiuxin cannot
help being ﬁlled with self‑loathing, which she extends to women in general: “What happened
today happened too abruptly, too unexpectedly, and too much like a dream. She was so confused
she did not know where to begin to think. She hated the ten busy years that made her feel she
wanted to cry before Yuan yet could not. ʻThis is woman!ʼ she cursed herself” (“Xifeng” 302‑3).
Although Qiuxin still has tender feelings for Yuan, and although she realizes through his
conversation that he cares for her and intends to remain a loyal friend, the consideration of
extramarital sexual propriety means that it is unlikely they will continue in a normal relationship.

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ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

Once again, we realize this through Qiuxinʼs painfully self‑conscious ponderings: “Qiuxin . . . b eganhating herself again. The conversation of the past hour was not what she had wanted. Why did
she reveal her vulnerability to Yuan after not seeing him for ten years? Whatʼs more, wouldnʼt it
be harmful to Yuanʼs obligations to his family?” (“Xifeng,” 309‑10).
In this confused and self‑blaming frame of mind, Qiuxin arrives at her destination. Coming
to greet Yuan at the pier are his young wife and two children. After they depart in the mood of ahappily reunited family, Qiu‑xin disembarks by herself, as “a breath of west wind brushed acrossher expressionless face, sweeping up scattered pieces of paper and twirling them on the ground”(“Xifeng” 313).
If the theme of this story is loneliness, loneliness needs to be further speciﬁed̶less as amere human condition, as is commonly assumed, than as a new cultural condition, the conditionof being a woman in early twentieth‑century China who has opted to abandon the well‑trodden
and relatively secure path of wifehood and motherhood. The perplexity of Qiuxinʼs newfoundfreedom lies in the heavy price she

she has had to pay. To her thinking, freedom has only

materialized in the rigid form of a mutual exclusion: either career or marriage but not both.
Although Qiuxin can discuss this choice rationally and authoritatively (as the title of her lecturesuggests), she nonetheless feels emotionally trapped while at the same time obligated to moveon as though she has no choice,.

This contradictory psychological condition̶brought into sharp focus in this case by the chance
reappearance of the former male friend̶in which physical and social emancipation is somehow
lived and experienced as paralysis, points to modern Chinese womenʼs continued bondage to asocial contract based, predominantly, on heterosexual, reproductive domesticity. Qiuxin, we mightsay, is the personiﬁcation of an incomplete revolution: she can consciously opt against traditional
womanhood, but she remains imprisoned in its affective shadow by way of a deep sense of
personal dejection. Nowhere is this sense of dejection more directly expressed than in her name,“autumn heart,” two characters that, when combined, form the character, meaning sadness.

Without a doubt, Bing Xinʼs story, like much of her work, is a piece of sentimentalism. Froma technical point of view, however, what it highlights with economical means (within the spaceof just a few pages) is the formal congealment of̶and at that time still a novel experimentation
with̶what we would nowadays call psychic interiority. As a progressive woman writer, responsive to the tensions of modernity in early twentieth‑century China, Bing Xin rightly understoodthat, to portray feminine agency in a cultural context in which women, even highly educated ones
like herself, had long been subordinated, one needed to present that agency with special narrative
methods. What makes her infrequently read short story formally remarkable, then, are precisely
the codes that remain crucial to this day to the exploration of the self as the self is sutured withmodernized femininity.
The first such code is the modern womanʼs physical mobility: Qiuxin, for instance, is a
traveler, with the freedom to move from place to place that comes with education and relative37

Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” insocial standing. Second, physical mobility leads logically to hitherto unavailable opportunities forobservation̶as one is constantly in the company of strangers̶and thus for self‑examinationand introspection. As she reminisces about events of the past, Qiuxin literally looks at herself inthe mirror. Third, this “inward” turn toward the self (as seen by other people, as an objectiﬁed
image), albeit stemming from freedom, is ironically accompanied by a sense of entrapment anddegradation as well as by low self‑esteem. Fourth, the insights of introspection are revealed to
be a belated illumination̶of time and relationships that have receded and/or progressed beyond
oneʼs grasp. Fifth, a predominant feeling of melancholy pervades the character(s) involved, a feeling that is then semiotically reexternalized or metaphorized as nature, in the form of the elements
and the seasons, such as the west wind, late autumn, and so forth. (In this regard, the writing of
feminine sorrow borrows conveniently from the rich rhetorical repertoires of classical Chinese andEuropean romantic poetry, in which nature has often been anthropomorphized with human aﬀect
and cultural meaning.)
Ultimately, there is a lingering sense of loss. What exactly is lost? Beyond all the unpretentious signs of a mournful psychic reality, Bing Xinʼs story compels us to ask: how does a freeand highly educated woman come to think of herself in terms of loss, of having missed out onsomething, when to all appearances she has achieved a degree of autonomy that few in earlytwentieth‑century Chinese society, including men, ever enjoyed? In no uncertain terms, the story
suggests that Qiuxinʼs emotional disorientation is caused by her skepticism and insecurity about
her own choice (to forsake the rewards of the kinship family). We thus arrive at the ﬁnal presentation code familiar to sentimental introspection: whereas Yuan (the other) has reached,Qiuxin (the self) must, as it were, continue her journey in the form of an abject, self‑imposed.
The legacy of “Xifeng” is historical as well as formal. It brings to the fore the question of
how to deal, in writing, with womenʼs agency at a time when the constraints on that agency
remained, as ever, unrelenting, especially in the form of popular conceptions. To this question,
Bing Xin supplied the experimental answer of constructing a feminine psychic interiority, inwhich it is the woman characterʼs act of self‑examination that may be seen as the beginningof an alternative form of empowerment. Yet what remains unresolved in this legacy is precisely
the self‑contradictory form taken by this empowerment. In the midst of action and mobility,and professional achievement, pangs of self‑doubt, self‑denigration, and self‑beratement slowly
thicken into a kind of subjecthood with unmitigated̶and seemingly unmitigable̶feelings ofsadness. It is not the unfree woman but the free woman who feels herself trapped. Is this aﬀective overdetermination, which occupies such a central place in the narrative, also an ideological
overdetermination? The implications of this question are rich and weighty, and far from having
been exhaustively scrutinized. Perhaps because of this, several if not all of the (coded) featuresof Bing Xinʼs little piece continue to reappear in diﬀerent versions even in contemporary culturalrepresentations of modern Chinese women.

38ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

PSYCHIC INTERIORITIES IN THE FORM OF CINEMATIC FLASHBACKS:
MULTIPLICITIES IN MOTION

We may now turn to Ann Huiʼs ﬁlm, an autobiographical screen drama about

the coming‑of‑age of a young woman, Hueyin Cheung, whose life events span the 1950s to
1970s in Portuguese Macao, British Hong Kong, England, Japan, and mainland China.4 (Notably,
the screenplay was written by Wu Nianzhen, the famous collaborator with Taiwan director Hou
Hsiao‑hsien and an actor in ﬁlms such as Houʼsand Edward Yangʼs.) At

the heart of this drama is Hueyinʼs diﬃcult relationship with her mother since young childhood.
Before discussing the multiple dimensions of this relationship, let me ﬁrst recapitulate the main
events and the order in which they appear in the ﬁlm.
Chronologically, the main events revolving around the various characters are as follows:
1. Early 1940s: Aiko (Hueyinʼs mother), while a young woman in Beppu, her hometown, has an
episode of unrequited love. She soon leaves Japan to join her elder brother and his family in
Manchuria, a Japanese colony at that time.
2. 1945: After Japan loses the war, Aiko and her family are in hiding in Manchuria. Her brotherʼsbaby has fallen seriously ill, and, in an attempt to save him, she risks her own life by runningout onto the main road to seek help. Hueyinʼs father, a young translator for the military with afamily background in Chinese herbal medicine, saves the babyʼs life and becomes friends with
the Japanese family. When the family members, like other Japanese residents in Manchuria,
are being repatriated to Japan, the young man asks Aiko to stay with him in China.
3. The period from the late 1940s to 1963: Hueyinʼs parents are married, and Hue-yin is born in
Manchuria in 1948. With his wife and child, Hueyinʼs father rejoins his parents in Macao but
then leaves them behind as he goes alone to work in Hong Kong. Eventually, Aiko rejoins her
husband in Hong Kong, but little Hueyin refuses to leave Macao with her parents. She remains
in the care of her grandparents until 1963, when the latter decide to go back to Guangdong(south China) to join their younger son. At the age of about ﬁfteen, Hueyin is ﬁnally reunited
with her parents and younger sister in Hong Kong.
4. The period from 1963 to the early 1970s: At her parentsʼ home in Hong Kong, Hueyin feels
increasingly alienated from and critical of her mother. For the first time, she learns (fromher father and to her surprise) that her mother is Japanese and that much of her motherʼsseemingly unacceptable behavior is the result of having to cope with living a foreign culture.5
Despite this discovery, Hueyin decides to move out and live by herself.
5. 1973: Hueyin completes a masterʼs degree in communications/ﬁlm studies in London. (Herfather is dead by this point.) She is turned down for a job at the BBC, and, despite beingscheduled for an interview with another television station, she returns to Hong Kong to attend
her sisterʼs wedding. Her sister and brother-in-law then emigrate to Canada.

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Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” in

6. 1973: Hueyin stays in Hong Kong in her motherʼs ﬂat, watching television news reports on the
Cultural Revolution that is raging in China, especially in the Guangdong area.
7. Hueyin accompanies her mother on a visit to Beppu. This is the first visit home to Japanthat Aiko has made in three decades. It is an eye-opening experience for Hueyin, who begins
discovering things about her motherʼs past and comes to a new and sympathetic understandingof the older woman.
8. Back in Hong Kong, news of Hueyinʼs grandfatherʼs having had a stroke arrives. Hueyin visits
her grandparents in Guangzhou, bringing gifts of groceries and merchandise that her motherhas packed for her in‑laws. The elders are living in rather modest conditions and taking careof a young child with Down syndrome left in their care by Hueyinʼs uncle. As Hueyin sits by
her grandfatherʼs bed watching him fall asleep, she recalls her childhood years in Macao andtears roll down her cheeks.
As pointed out by critics, the use of flashbacks̶commonly understood as a literary orcinematic device in which an earlier event is inserted into the chronological order of a narrative̶
is a regular feature in Ann Huiʼs ﬁlms.6 Does this have something to do with Huiʼs interest in
womenʼs issues and in devising ways to portray a nonsynchronous but not nonexistent frame ofaction/agency from within the minds of female characters? (As Elaine Yee‑lin Ho points out,“her ﬁlms centralize and individualize women subjects in ways that the earlier Cantonese cinema
had rarely attempted.”)7 While the answer to this will have to remain conjectural, it seems fairto say that, in the context of modern Chinese culture, cinematic ﬂashbacks have provided oneof the most productive methods for elaborating womenʼs psychic interiority, a method that canbe traced to early twentieth‑century writers such as Bing Xin.8 Flashbacks allow for a speciﬁckind of cognitive and epistemic shift, whereby the world becomes comprehensible not somuch through direct sensory‑motor movements as through temporally mediated events such as
memories, retellings, and juxtapositions of disparate images. As a ﬁlmmaker, Huiʼs investment inﬂashbacks is thus historically in step with what Gilles Deleuze has discussed as the emergence ofthe time image in post‑Second World War (European, American, and Japanese) cinema, whereinhuman agency itself, or so Deleuze argues, has undergone a mutation from being rational action
to being a “seeing function, at once fantasy and report, criticism and compassion”9̶a mutationin which, in other words, action (in all its spontaneity) has become irreversibly supplanted byand subordinated to time (with its inassimilable complexities). Huiʼs own academic work on the
Frenchauthor Alain Robbe‑Grillet̶the subject of her master of philosophy thesisat the University of Hong Kong in the 1970s̶was, in this light, an early indication of her ongoing
attraction to avant‑garde experimentation with narrative time in contemporary literature as well
as ﬁlm.
Although Deleuze himself, notably, expressed reservation about ﬂashbacks̶his reason beingthat they tend to require external justiﬁcation10̶I nonetheless believe that ﬂashbacks can oﬀer

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ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009a highly interesting kind of narrative mediation, one that has extensive implications for the construction of psychic interiority. In representational terms, cinematic ﬂashbacks are nothing short ofa palpable link at which the otherwise imperceptible processes of mental transition and transfer
involving temporal diﬀerences can be visibly displayed and observed.11 But therein lies the paradox, in ways that remind us of Pasoliniʼs point about the double nature of cinema (as discussed
in the previous chapter): once displayed on the screen, such ﬂashbacks ineluctably confront uswith the question of whether they can always be rerouted back to some originating consciousness.
And even where such rerouting is made explicit (as, for instance, by voice‑over narration or byvisual focalization on a particular character), the projectile, objectlike nature of cinematic images,
with their appearance of ontological self‑suﬃciency, tends to leave something ambiguous about
their supposedly obvious (re)connectability to a clearly demarcated psychic interiority. Whereas
in Bing Xinʼs story, psychic interiority is consigned to a single woman character in such a manneras to leave little doubt that she is the subject of the thoughts, memories, and reﬂections being
described, the cinematic ﬂashbacks in Huiʼs ﬁlm seem to push beyond the demarcations of such
subjecthood and beyond a simple or direct correspondence between individual characters and (theobjectiﬁed images of) memory/interiority.
On the screen, through the interweaving of diﬀerent charactersʼ perspectives, the events in
Huiʼs ﬁlm actually unfold in the following order:
5, 3, 6, 3, 5/6, 3, 4, 6, 7, 1, 2, 8
One can tell by this drastically altered sequencing the constitutive role played by theﬂashbacks (and, by implication, memories). Even this sequencing, moreover, is not an absolutely
precise rendition of the images appearing on the screen because there are occasionally memories/
ﬂashbacks inserted within memories/ﬂashbacks. For this reason, a reading of the ﬁlm cannot, to
my mind, proceed by simply reestablishing the chronology of the events. Rather, it is necessary toconsider how the ﬁlmʼs materiality resides in these temporal reversals and dispersions, which are
seldom straightforward.
In other words, rather than using chronology as the ultimate rationale for (re)organizing theevents, the question to consider is how the disjointedness in which the events literally appear
signiﬁes. What kind of status should the ﬂashbacks be given? Should they be treated as reality,
the way the nonﬂashback scenes are?12 But strictly speaking, are there nonﬂashback scenes inthis ﬁlm? After all, the ﬁlm begins, continues, and concludes explicitly with Hueyinʼs voice‑overnarration recounting events of the past.13 Even what seems to be the present or chronologicallythe most recent moment̶1973̶is rendered as a set of memories, to which Hueyinʼs voice‑over refers, signiﬁcantly, as “that year” in the latter part of the ﬁlm. Is the entire ﬁlm a collectionof ﬂashbacks then? If so, how are we to determine the relative or diﬀerential function of one
ﬂashback against another? Should we suppose that each ﬂashback simply gives way to another41

Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” inand so on, ad inﬁnitum, or is there some ﬁnal, stable referent that transcends them and gives
them coherence from the outside, in an extradiegetic fashion?14
To begin to approach these questions, let me note that there are at least three types of ﬂashbacks in play in. The most accessible type is the ﬂashback with a voice‑over.

For instance, on her return to Hong Kong at the beginning of the ﬁlm, Hueyin and her motherget into an argument over what she should wear at her sisterʼs wedding. As Hueyin stands by
the window with her back to the camera, we hear her voice‑over̶“In my memory, motherwasnʼt like that. . . . S he used to be a silent and reserved woman”̶and we are then shown theﬂashback to the Macao period. Or, when, toward the end of their trip to Japan, Aiko recalls (forher daughter) how she met her husband in Manchuria, her voice gives clear indications that weare reentering the past. In these scenes, a characterʼs voice serves as the narrative consciousness
guiding us back to the past, and the ﬂashback in the form of images becomes subordinated to thevoice, which provides a supporting frame.
The second type of flashback is the flashback without any voice‑over. In this case, theaudience is shown one set of images and then another without being explicitly told who is doing
the remembering. We see this, for instance, when the unpleasant haircut scene of 1973 (inpreparation for the sisterʼs wedding) shifts (back) to the unpleasant haircut scene of the 1950s in
Macao or when Hueyinʼs somewhat awkward experience of being surrounded and talked about
by curious strangers in Japan shifts (back) to her motherʼs experience of being surrounded andtalked about by unfriendly strangers in the Macao household. Although Hui tends in such cases
to refocalize on a characterʼs face as a way to signal to the audience “this is what

person isremembering,” the perspectival polysemia embedded in each set of ﬂashbacks makes it diﬃcult
to accept such refocalization as the only possible or exclusive meaning available. Instead ofsimply (re)matching the ﬂashback with a characterʼs face/consciousness (in what is sometimes
called “point of view”), I believe this second type of ﬂashback raises a more tricky issue, namely:
how do we evaluate the juxtaposition of images without ultimately falling back on the logic ofomniscient narration?15 If the point is not simply to trace the images back to a deﬁnite someone,
not even an omniscient storyteller or seer, how do we begin to process imagistic transitions andtransfers? Are they to be grasped as connections, mutual reflections, unexpected crossings, orinﬁnite becomings (whereby one set of images mysteriously transforms into another)?
Third, there are the ﬂashbacks within ﬂashbacks̶the best example being Aikoʼs story of her
past (in Manchuria and, before that, in Japan) within Hueyinʼs narration/memory of their trip toJapan. There is also the example of Hueyinʼs ﬂashback to herself (as a child in Macao) watching
her grandfather picking up a papaya at a Macao market stall, within the ﬂashback of her (as asecondary‑school pupil in uniform in Hong Kong) watching an older man (who resembles her
grandfather) picking up some lotus root at a Hong Kong market stall. In this type of ﬂashback,the act of remembering has become its own referent, so that behind one memory is not simply
another memory but, strictly speaking, another act of remembering, with no clear-cut or ultimate

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ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

beginning to be ascertained. At this juncture, the fact that the entire ﬁlm is oﬀered as an accountof past events can, arguably, be used to advance the point that every scene we see is always
already a ﬂashback (a past selfʼs act of remembering) within a ﬂashback (a present selfʼs act ofremembering).
Whether it serves to unify two or more temporally segregated events, raise questions about
the subject or agent of memory (and, with that, the ontological status of adjacent images̶andof imagistic adjacency), or demonstrate the mise‑en‑abîme inscribed in the act of remembering,ﬂashbacks in Huiʼs work are without question a provocative way of articulating boundaries̶notjust spatial and geographical but also temporal and mental̶and their malleability. To this extent,
the actual unfolding of events in

is not, and should not be, understood simply asa secondary arrangement that stands in a dualist relationship with the original, linear chronological order. Rather, it is more fruitful to see in the alternative sequencing the emergence of atemporal crisscrossing that, in the process of multiplying perspectives, also challenges a simple
bifurcation of time (into, for instance, story and plot or chronology and narration). That is to say,once ﬂashbacks are in use, what is of interest is not so much pinpointing a polarized structural
relation between clock/calendar time and artiﬁcial/ﬁctive time, as apprehending a proliferation of
cognitive and epistemic potentialities beyond what is allowed by such a polarity. The meaning of
successive time̶of time as succession̶whether in the form of linear chronology or even in theform of a jumbled sequence̶is no longer the most crucial concern here.16
Accordingly, in Huiʼs hands, “psychic interiority” as a narrative technique has mutated (andadvanced) to the point of being an open, because endlessly expandable and extendable, time andspace, quite distinct from the claustrophobic introspective recoiling of the self that we encounterin Bing Xin. Interiority is now not so distinguishable from exteriority, if only because it has tobe conveyed through objectlike images, images that are accessibly out there for all to see. In thisrespect, even the most simple ﬂashback does not exactly invite a straightforward restoration ofconnections; rather, it makes visible what I would call multiplicities in motion (multiplicities interms of characters, times, actions, and memories)̶a speciﬁcally ﬁlmic process, perhaps, thatsignals at once the pluralizing and inevitable dividing̶and fissuring̶of mental and affective
circuits.17
The absolute centrality of ﬂashbacks insuggests both Huiʼs aﬃnity witholder modern Chinese women intellectuals such as Bing Xin (insofar as she has continued toremold “psychic interiority” by borrowing some of the familiar formal codes of presentation) and
her arrival, through the cinematographic interspersing of temporalities, at a considerably more
dynamic working model than the single woman characterʼs perspective. Multiplicities in motion,engendered in Huiʼs film by cinematic flashbacks, indicate that the exploration of “psychic
interiority” has reached a stage at which a cohesive reassembling of meanings is, at the level oftechnique, unnecessary if not altogether impossible. Instead, it is precisely the disintegration ofsuch cohesive reassembling that lends such exploration an energy that implodes and splinters the43

Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” innotion of “psychic interiority” as a neatly bounded self.

THE CHINESE KINSHIP FAMILY:ETHNOSOCIAL STRONGHOLD AND . . . RECUPERATIVE CLOSURE?
Although Hueyin is aware that her mother is Japanese, it is not until she accompanies Aiko to
Japan that she ﬁnally achieves her personal enlightenment, her coming‑of‑age, as it were. Thisjourney to Japan enables Hueyin to appreciate for the ﬁrst time how her mother has lived in
the Cheung family as a foreigner, slighted and discriminated against during her years in Macao
by her in‑laws and their house guests and condemned to a life of loneliness when her husband
was away for long periods of time. In the ﬁgure of the emotionally remote mother with whom
the daughter could not communicate, Hui oﬀers an outsiderʼs perspective on the Chinese kinshipfamily, which thrives as an ethnosocial stronghold with entrenched customs and practices. These
include a condoned belittlement of women, demand for ﬁlial piety, indulgence of young children,
and, most important of all, xenophobia toward those who happen not to be familial or ethnic insiders. Because, even under the most benevolent of circumstances, a daughter‑in‑law traditionallyoccupies the suspect position of someone from the outside, Aikoʼs status is triply exterior̶as adaughter‑in‑law; as a representative of the disdained, though by the latter part of 1945 defeated,national enemy; and, most crucially, as non‑Chinese.
In a story that explicitly alludes to exile in its title, the boundaries governing peopleʼs cultural
identities, with their modes of inclusion and exclusion, logically constitute a major source of thehuman drama,18 but how is a director supposed to depict such boundaries on ﬁlm? Huiʼs method
is ingenious: I am thinking of the incidents that feature the mundane and almost unnoticeable details of food consumption and food sharing. Whereas inandfood is associated in diﬀerent nostalgic manners with labor or with languor, infood is perceptively presented as the place where ethnocultural boundaries are most intimately̶
and obstinately̶drawn.
In London, as a foreign student, Hueyin leads her fellow students to purchase a Chinese
takeout meal of spring rolls. Why spring rolls̶why not ﬁsh and chips, for instance? Are these
spring rolls, marking Hueyin as an East Asian, an outsider (a colonial subject, in fact) to Englanddespite her fluent English, a means of prefiguring the kind of cultural conflict that is to beenacted repeatedly over food in the rest of the ﬁlm? Among Hueyinʼs memories of her childhood
and adolescence are several having to do with eating̶in Macao, of buying bread from a hawker
who is passing by her grandparentsʼ house, of her grandmother taking her to school with treatsof Chinese snacks (pieces of sweetened winter melon and beef jerky), and of having dim sumwith her grandparents at a traditional teahouse; in Hong Kong, of being ordered by her father tocook dinner when her mother neglects her housewifely duties by playing mah‑jongg all day. Foodin these memories is associated with Hueyinʼs estrangement from and resentment of her mother,44

ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

but the ethnocultural import of their fraught relationship will only be understood later (by theaudience), when Hueyin learns that her mother is Japanese.
Nowhere is the phenomenon of ethnoculture as aggressive boundary setting more acutely
portrayed than in the grandparentsʼ treatment of their Japanese daughter‑in‑law in the Macao
household. Dismissing the food prepared by Aiko as unacceptably “raw” and “cold” ()̶in ways that bring to mind Claude Lévi‑Straussʼs analysis of culinary signiﬁcations in̶and hence bad for the stomach, the elders are shown gathering in

19

their own bedroom with a portable stove, cooking and sharing dishes that are more agreeable totheir southern Chinese taste. “Raw” and “cold” is, of course, also the way Hueyinʼs mother comes
across to her own child. By contrast, the camera shows the grandfather beckoning aﬀectionately
to his granddaughter to join them in their insidersʼ properly cooked feast, while Aiko is banishedoutside their door like a savage, left to eat her deplored, because uncooked and uncivilized, meal
all by herself. In the name of procuring culinary satisfaction (“things taste better when cooked
this way”), the grandparents have de facto used their eating habits as a way to mark their territory. By stigmatizing and excluding Aiko, what they consume and incorporate̶we might also sayinternalize̶is none other than the violence of a rigidly enforced cultural border, with “us” on thisside and “them” on the other.
While the early part of the film concentrates on Hueyinʼs recollection of her motherʼsalienation (a condition that she, as a child, was unwittingly complicit in aggravating), the second
half of the ﬁlm reverses the roles of daughter and mother as cultural insider and outsider as they
travel to Japan. Now it is Hueyin who feels she is the foreigner, observing the local customs andfestivities, the reunions with family and friends, and the visit to her motherʼs home (including hermaternal grandparentsʼ graves) with a sense of fascination, intensiﬁed in part by her inability to
speak and understand the Japanese language. Interestingly, this episode of exoticism, suggestinga brief symmetry between mother and daughter, produces a new sense of reﬂexivity on Hueyinʼs
part. It is as though the inconvenience of being stuck in a foreign country where she is deaf
and mute̶a multifaceted obstacle in narratological terms̶becomes in the end a rewarding
homecoming experience. For the ﬁrst time, Hueyin feels reconciled with and able to return hometo the mother from whom she has been exiled all these years. With the interruptions caused by
the lack of understanding ﬁnally smoothed away, she can forge ahead in the course of her own
personal growth.
From the motherʼs perspective, things are quite diﬀerent, and the positive change and self‑
development that we witness taking place in Hueyin cannot be said to be evident in Aiko. Aikothus stands out in the film as an enigma, a character who remains only partially discernible
and whose perpetual cultural liminality punctures the illusion of a continuum between motherʼsand daughterʼs perspectives. For Aiko, the trip to Japan is a journey to a past̶her familial andnational origin̶that has become distant and emotionally demanding; it is a return to a home thatis fast disappearing. Not only is she confronted with her own unresolved feelings about the people

45

Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” inand events of her youth (she repeatedly praises Japanese things when talking to Hueyin yet neverforgets, while they are with her Japanese family and friends, to show oﬀ her daughter as a trophyof her time abroad and a sign of her social enviability); she also has to cope with and concede
to her brothersʼ intent to sell their parental home, the only stable reference point she has left inJapan.20
More critically, how has Aiko managed to survive in a foreign land, among people who havemarginalized and rejected her with such hostility? What are the revealing traces of her survival
tactics among the Chinese̶and of her permanent dislocation from her own culture? From the
beginning of the ﬁlm, we notice that she is (or has become) a quite typical Cantonese maternal
ﬁgure, who dresses not only herself but also her daughters for ceremonious occasions in gaudy
Cantonese styles (with overkills of deep red and gold colors and glittery jewels) and who keeps
stressing the importance of their looking like one family. To be sure, Aikoʼs eﬀorts to make herself
look the same as the people around her have been evident since the early days in Macao, when
she is always seen wearing a, but, again, nowhere are such eﬀorts more striking

than in the rituals of cooking and eating.
After the wedding banquet is over, Aiko brings home the leftovers with the intention of
making a “hot pot” the same way her in‑laws used to do in Macao. On her return to Japan,
she is at ﬁrst delighted to sample again the authentic Japanese dishes she misses such as soba
noodles with tempura, shrimp, and tofu. Once they have stayed for a while, however, she begins
to express exactly the same critical attitude toward Japanese cooking that was expressed by her
in‑laws years earlier̶that it is “not right” because it is raw and cold, that it makes her stomach
feel uncomfortable, and that she much prefers̶is homesick for̶Cantonese food, especially the
hot homemade soups. Having more or less completely assimilated to her husbandʼs culture overthe decades, Aiko discovers that her former home has receded to the margins of the civilized̶somuch so that it has become distasteful, inedible, indeed uninhabitable. Eventually, back in Hong
Kong, when news of Hueyinʼs grandfatherʼs stroke reaches them, it is Aiko who, like a dutiful
Chinese daughter‑in‑law, instructs her own daughter that, no matter how busy she is, she must
visit her grandparents in Guangdong. As she informs Hueyin, she has spent the afternoon shopping for and packing what she imagines are basic necessities for the elders, including, remarkably(as we ﬁnd out when Hueyinʼs luggage is unpacked on arrival), some(dried bok choy), a

traditional Cantonese soup ingredient.
If the ending of the ﬁlm shows a homecoming for the daughter, whose attitude toward hermother has become much more compassionate, it marks Aikoʼs future trajectory rather diﬀerently,
with much more uncertainty. In the manner of Qiuxin, Bing Xinʼs heroine, a sense of loss andmelancholy haunts the older womanʼs story as she faces the consequences of the life choices she
made years ago when she was a courageously independent young woman. (Hueyin observes that
Aiko seems to have become “much more quiet and reserved” and “turned much older” since theirtrip to Japan.) Although she has followed the rules of the heterosexual social contract by getting46

ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

married and having children, she has, it seems, paid a heavy price in terms of what she has had
to abandon along the way, namely, her ties to her own country and family. (For instance, her own
younger brother has never forgiven her for having been disloyal to Japan by marrying a Chineseman.) Just when Hueyin seems to have refound her home in Aiko, then, Aiko has bade farewellto hers, not knowing if she will ever return. Because of Aikoʼs story, the ﬂashbacks of the trip toJapan loom as a set of fractured passages, with profoundly divergent directions and implications
for the two women, who seem to have been briefly brought together in one dimension yetotherwise go in separate ways.
Like Bing Xin, Ann Hui names her story with a purposeful evocation of autumn. “Ke tu
qiu hen,” literally “Autumn melancholy on a sojourn away from home,” is the title of a well‑known Cantonese song (based on the musical form

, or “the southern tune”) in which apoor scholar, on a trip under the autumn moon, laments his lost love, a faithful courtesan who,
unlike others in her profession, did not mind his poverty and gave him her heart. Performed togreat renown by the Cantonese opera actor and singer Bai Jurong during the 1910s and 1920s,
the song, still heard from time to time in contemporary Hong Kong, exists now as a nostalgic
reminder of bygone eras for older Cantonese‑speaking populations.21 In, thesong is introduced in ﬂashbacks to Hueyinʼs childhood in Macao: her grandmother is taking a
nap while the song is being played on the radio, and Hueyin (in the manner of young Chinesechildren who are coached by elders during their early years) is reciting Tang Dynasty poems forher grandfather, who rewards her with some candy and coaxes her how not to “forget [her] origins” (), before the two of them fall asleep together, with the little girl lying prone on topof the old man (ﬁg. 1). The leisurely daytime rest, the sweet intimacy between the generations(with the grandfather gently telling the grandchild to study medicine when she grows up so she
can serve China), and the mildly sad tune of Bai Jurongʼs singing blend together to compose an
unforgettable picture of a previous life moment. The song is heard again at the ﬁlmʼs closing, withﬂashbacks to a scene of grandchild and grandparents sauntering past a pond of lotuses in bloom.
Just as the lyrics speak of a lost romantic love and just as the tune recalls a musical form that haslong since declined, so do Grandfather and Grandmother loom in Hueyinʼs mind as loved ones
whose times on earth are about to end. Her own independence and freedom̶as a cosmopolitan
traveler, journalist, daughter, grandchild, and urban woman̶hence becomes ﬁnally tinged, as thetitle of the song suggests, with the autumnal melancholy of the brooding exile, her mind saturated
with the awareness of the passing of time.
As in Bing Xinʼs story, we see the prominence of a chain of imaginary associations: the well‑educated woman, whose physical mobility becomes the backdrop to a series of introspective
processes. In Bing Xinʼs story, the exploration of the feminine self is contained within one
characterʼs life and over one journey; in Huiʼs ﬁlm, the eﬀort is a complex one involving two
women characters from two generations, over a number of decades, cultural locations, and political situations. Importantly, however, even when it is continually challenged by modern capitalist

47

Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” insociety, in which women are gaining various degrees of social and professional autonomy, theChinese kinship family is able to reassert its demands with deep‑rooted force. Just as Qiuxinʼs sorrow seems to conﬁrm and revalidate the virtue of what she has forsaken (husband and children),so, too, does Aikoʼs voluntary conversion into a Cantonese daughter‑in‑law and mother seem to
conﬁrm the unyielding domination of Chinese family life, notwithstanding the imminent mortalityof the elders.
In this regard, the individualization and empowerment of women in Huiʼs ﬁlms, albeit generically and genealogically tied to the release of “psychic interiorities” into multiplicities in motion(as I suggested in the previous section), need to be assessed not only in and by themselves but
also against a recurrent feature in Huiʼs work: the patriotic patriarch ﬁgures in whom she seems
consistently and positively invested. Consider the spectrum of older men in her ﬁlms: not justHueyinʼs grandfather, who even on his sickbed urges Hueyin not to “lose hope in China” (literally,“not to be disappointed with China” in the Cantonese dialogue) but also the grandfather who
holds on to Chinese values against the onslaught of youthful American culture in(, 1991) and the old man with Alzheimerʼs disease who continues tobelieve he is a ﬁghter pilot ﬂying a warplane for the Chinese Nationalist government in(, 1995). No matter how xenophobic, prejudiced, or literally amnesic, these

patriarchs are in the end shown to be worth loving and tolerating. By contrast, the women characters, in whom Hui places her vision for change, are often shown to be sympathetic only insofar
as they seem capable of learning to accommodate these father ﬁgures, together with the values
they embody, exactly as they are. In a nutshell, the women̶and the women alone̶are asked tobe versatile and ﬂexible: they must actively adapt and adjust even as the old men are adored forremaining themselves.
I am therefore tempted to read in the conclusion ofa recuperative attitude

toward the Chinese kinship family. Elaine Yee‑lin Hoʼs remarks oﬀer a fair summation of Huiʼswork here: “The exploration of agency is heavily circumscribed by a continued investment inwhat inherited strictures will both allow and afford and increasingly reincorporated into an
ethnocultural determinism that is, by history and deﬁnition, patriarchal in its social exempliﬁcations. As such, her ﬁlms tread the narrow path between the critique and reinvention of traditionand estrange it even while aﬃrming its continued power to structure, coopt, and exclude womenʼssubjects.”22
Whether in early twentieth‑century fiction or in late twentieth‑century film, the feminine
dramas I have discussed suggest that what Ho aptly refers to as “ethnocultural determinism” hassurvived with tenacity, condemning those who dare oppose or resist it to a life of isolation andforlornness. Autumn hearts, with their heavy sense of melancholy and loss, are thus ideologically
overdetermined and seem to persist in spite of the novelization and avant‑gardism that writersand directors alike have achieved at the level of technique. In Huiʼs case, one may go so far as
to say that, where there is dispersion and disintegration at the level of the cinematic ﬂashbacks,

48

ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

there is also assimilation, patriarchization, and siniﬁcation at the level of communal belonging.
For Hui as for Bing Xin, if the engagement with “psychic interiority” has delivered possibilities
for imagining an insuppressible feminine agency, ultimately it is also in womenʼs social lives thatthe emotional strictures imposed by the Chinese kinship family seem the least escapable. Where
boundaries have been made more fluid by means of avant‑garde experimentalism, boundaries
also seem to be reinforced̶sentimentally̶in terms of kinship bondage. To that extent,
is a powerful reminder of the ethnoculturally speciﬁc

imperialist excesses of theChinese family tradition, which is as treacherous as it can be life‑sustaining and which continues
to command submission like a kind of nature. Autumn hearts are the recurrent symptoms ofenduring this “natural” environment.
Notes
1. For discussions of biographical and autobiographical writings in modern Chinese literature, including
those in relation to womenʼs experiences, see Wendy Larson,(Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1991); Jin Feng,(West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 2004); Lingzhen
Wang,(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004).
2.

(Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1943), 296‑313. Translations from the Chinese aremine. Henceforth references will be included in parentheses in the text.

3. On the theme of loneliness in this story, see C. T. Hsia,(New Ha-ven: Yale UP, 1961), 76-77. Hsiaʼs view is that the recurrence of this theme indicates Bing Xinʼs “inability
to develop further” as a writer (77). See also Gloria Bien, “Images of Women in Bing Xinʼs Fiction,” in, ed. Angela Jung Palandri (Eugene: Asian Studies Program atthe U of Oregon, 1982). For a discussion of the problem with seeing womenʼs writings as underdevelopedand immature, see chapter 4 of my(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991).
4. “Hueyin” is the spelling of the characterʼs name (based on its Cantonese pronunciation) in the ﬁlmʼsEnglish subtitles, though a more accurate transliteration of the Cantonese would be “Hugh‑yun.” In, the name would be Xiaoen.
5. Hueyinʼs astonishment at hearing about her motherʼs ethnic origins at this point is, I believe, a ﬂawed
detail in the ﬁlm because Aikoʼs Japaneseness has been introduced numerous times during the ﬂashbacks
to the Macao period, when Hueyin is present as a child. Even if the repression of such an importantpiece of information is possible, it is not probable or convincing.
6. For a substantive discussion of Huiʼs works, including the implications of memory, see Elaine Yee‑lin Ho,“Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity: The Films of Ann Hui,” in, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), 177‑206.
For brief general discussions of Huiʼs contributions to Hong Kong cinema, see Stephen Teo,
(London: British Film Institute, 1997), 149‑52, 211‑15, 212‑13, 265‑66.
For an analysis ofConstruction of Identity in, see Patricia Brett Erens, “Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the,” in, ed. Esther M. K. Cheung and Chu Yiu‑wai (Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 2004), 177‑95 (this essay

49Rey Chow Autumn Hearts: Filming Feminine “Psychic Interiority” in

was originally published in

39.4 [Summer 2000]: 43‑59). See also Erens, “The Film

Work of Ann Hui,” in, ed. Poshek Fu and David

Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 176‑95 (this essay overlaps in part with “Crossing Borders”).
Additional relevant information on Hui and her work, including references to Chinese‑language materials,
can be found in Michael Berry,,

foreword by Martin Scorsese (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), 423‑39.
7. Ho, “Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity,” 180.
8. For an example of Bing Xinʼs use of the ﬂashback in literary writing, see my discussion of her story “Di
yi ci yanhui” (The ﬁrst dinner party) in chapter 4 of
9. Gilles Deleuze,.

, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U

of Minnesota P, 1989), 19.
10. “The question of the ﬂashback is this: it has to be justiﬁed from elsewhere” (ibid., 48). Although I do
not ﬁnd Deleuzeʼs qualiﬁcation to be entirely useful in the present discussion, I have beneﬁted from his
philosophically rich argument about the centrality of time in post-Second World War cinema.
11. For a detailed historical and theoretical study of the ﬂashback, see Maureen Turim,(London: Routledge, 1989), especially chap. 6, in which she discusses the renovation of the ﬂashback as an element of modernism in ﬁlm after the Second World War.
12. A contemporary Hong Kong ﬁlm in which ﬂashbacks take on a fantastical status (because they are thememories of a ghost) is Stanley Kwanʼs. See my discussion in the chapter “A Souvenir of Love,”in(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998). The

chapter was originally published in

7.2 (Fall 1993): 59-78.

13. This is what leads Erens to write: “The past is seen only in terms of its relevance to the present. A present consciousness pervades the representation of the past” (“Crossing Borders,” 186).
14. Erens provides such a ﬁnal, stable referent by reading the ﬁlm as Ann Huiʼs autobiography. Accordingly,
she suggests distinguishing between Ann Huiʼs past and her memories of her past: “I am going to referto the scenes in Macau and the years before her third birthday as memories or recollections rather than
ﬂashbacks because I feel that Hui has consciously constructed a subject in the present (Hueyin as narrator who addresses us in the ﬁrst person). Despite the so-called ever ʻpresent tenseʼ of cinema, we neverliterally return to the past in. Rather, Hueyin, in the present, tells us her memories ofvarious stages of her life” (“Crossing Borders,” 185). Erensʼs proposed solution is reasonable, but it works
only insofar as the filmʼs significations are rerouted to the consciousness of the author (in this case,director) as the ultimate determinant. Such a rerouting would seem to defeat the point of engaging withthe material/semiotic complexity of the representations of the past in the ﬁrst place. Another way of
putting all this would be to say that, while autobiographical elements are undoubtedly present in the ﬁlm,
the ﬁlm does not have to be read exclusively as autobiography.
15. Some critics refer to the non‑character‑speciﬁc ﬂashback as the impersonal ﬂashback and attribute it toan “omniscient camera” or “omniscient ﬁlmmaker.” See Bernard F. Dick,, 3d ed. (NewYork: St. Martins, 1998), 194.
16. For this insight, I am indebted to Turimʼs discussion of Roland Barthes on pages 10‑12 of.
17. Leung Ping‑kwanʼs remarks on Huiʼs earlier ﬁlm() are relevant here: “All these dif-ferent forces cannot be harmonized, just as the divergent perspectives and fragmented narratives refuse
to be easily uniﬁed, but it is exactly through their conﬂicts that the complex hybrid nature of the urban
space and the cultural identity of Hong Kong are revealed” (“Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity ofHong Kong,” in50, 227-51; the quotation is from 241).

ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

18. This is a consistent feature of Huiʼs films, many of which thematize people crossing cultures̶forexample,

(

),

),
(

(
(

),

(

), and), among others. As Erens writes: “Throughout her career, she has focused on the

lives of characters who find themselves exiles in a foreign land: Vietnamese in Hong Kong and thePhilippines, Japanese in Vietnam, Mainlanders in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers in England and Japan,
Americans in China, foreigners in Macau, and even Han Chinese under the Manchus” (“The Film Workof Ann Hui,” 179). Teo writes that “the burden of the quest for ethnic purity was a theme never better
treated by a Hong Kong director” (19. Claude Levi-Strauss,, 151).
, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1969).
20. In her own reﬂections on the ﬁlm, Ann Hui has said:
My main feeling was about my momʼs experience and the irony of her journey. When she was in Hong
Kong, all she did was scream for her homeland, but when she ﬁnally went back to Japan she didnʼtappreciate it at all. . . . The concept that we should unconditionally love our homeland was just an ideathat had been drummed into our heads, and I was beginning to grow skeptical of such concepts. But myskepticism was not just about the concept of oneʼs homeland, but about all conceptions of identity andnationality. The deﬁnition of these concepts can be very diﬀerent for diﬀerent individuals based on theirown background and experiences. (interview with HUI, in BERRY,
21. The song is also featured in, 431); see my brief discussion of its connotations in the context of that ﬁlm

in “A Souvenir of Love.”
22. Ho, “Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity,” 186. Hoʼs remarks are intended as reﬂections on
Huiʼs earlier ﬁlms (from 1979 to 1982), but they are, in my opinion, relevant to Huiʼs works as a whole.

51