Ruan Lingyu
Ai Xia and Ruan’s real life suicides sandwich New Women’s fictional suicide from the film. The hardships experienced by women such as Ai Xia and Ruan Lingyu could be attributed to this cultural change in regards to “the woman question” at the time. As stated in Christopher Rhea’s “Chinese Film Classics 1922-1949”; “Ruan Lingyu has become a symbol of the glamor, romance, and unfulfilled potential of Republican China, and her story has been endlessly retold”