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Intersections of Gender, Generation, and Class at Hong Kong’s Border: Precarious Peripheries in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013)

Gina Marchetti
p. 21-42

Texte intégral

Introduction

1At the margins of a male-dominated film industry and working at the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), female directors struggle to make a living in an often tense cross-border business environment. Moreover, the demands of globalization exacerbate the competition local filmmakers face in their efforts to exploit the expanding motion picture market on the Chinese mainland. Nevertheless, Hong Kong female filmmakers still manage to tell stories about women from the margins of society who navigate the uncertainties of life in the nebulous border regions of Chinese society. Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013) make use of the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China to explore stories about women marginalized by their reliance on men, as well as Hong Kong’s increasing economic dependence on mainland China.

2Based on the experiences of film producer Roger Lee Yan-Lam (played by actor Andy Lau on screen), A Simple Life narrates the story of his elderly housekeeper’s transition to a nursing home after she suffers a debilitating stroke. A Simple Life effectively uses the Hong Kong film business as a backdrop to explore the changing class dynamics of the territory in the years following the Handover by contrasting the glamour of the entertainment industry with the “simple life” shared by Roger and his domestic helper Ah Tao (Deanie Ip). Because she relies on Roger’s precarious status within the film business, Ah Tao is doubly dependent on the good graces of her employer as well as his standing in the Chinese-language film market with its rapidly shifting fortunes.

3Bends also deals with an “upstairs-downstairs” story in which the difficulties a chauffeur Fai (mainland star Chen Kun) has in finding a maternity hospital for his mainland wife, pregnant with their second child, parallel the precipitous fall in economic circumstances of a wealthy woman Anna (Carina Lau) suddenly abandoned by her husband. Bends concretely displays the gendered nature of the bourgeois housewife’s social class status through her reliance on her husband’s financial success that ostensibly depends on his mainland Chinese business connections.

  • 1 Research for this article was partially funded by a GRF (General Research Fund) award, “Gendered Sc (...)

4The cross-border nature of the films’ narratives highlights the ways in which gender inflects class, age, and status at the margins of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese society. As businessmen rely on mainland China to generate profits, the cross-border mistress replaces the pampered “trophy” wife as an indicator of social status, and, as geopolitical labor relations transform domestic service in the territory, temporary domestic workers from Southeast Asia provide an alternative to local labor. The Hong Kong socialite in Bends as well as the faithful amah in A Simple Life represent a vanished era of the territory’s history. Their families have scattered to other parts of the globe, and post-colonial Hong Kong moves even further to the margins of the Chinese-speaking world. This analysis1 accordingly focuses on the impact of the border in defining the identities of the female protagonists in Bends and A Simple Life. Pushed to the periphery of a male-dominated Chinese society, these women struggle to survive as they navigate fluctuating class and gender constraints at the borders of a rapidly changing world.

Intersectional Precarity in Hong Kong-PRC Cross-Border Productions

  • 2 K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A Black Feminist Critique of Antid (...)

5In an essay published in 1989, legal scholar and feminist theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the notion of “intersectionality” to discuss the way in which gender and race intersect to magnify the marginalization of African American women in the United States.2 As the concept evolved over the next decades, intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, (dis)ability, age, and other markers of identity began pointing to the various ways in which power hierarchies must be understood in nuanced terms to facilitate meaningful social change. The border between mainland China and Hong Kong produces its own particular anxieties involving intersectional identities, with gender playing a key role in relation to class, age, language, nationality and immigration status.

  • 3 The bill was withdrawn, but the People’s Republic of China imposed the sweeping National Security L (...)

6Even after Hong Kong’s change in status from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997, a hard border continues to produce contradictory feelings of security and anxiety. Events such as the 2019 protests against a proposed extradition bill that would have made it easier for mainland Chinese authorities to demand the transfer of suspects for trials, as well as the 2020 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis in which health care workers went on an unprecedented strike to demand stricter border controls to mitigate the spread of the disease point to two instances that illustrate Hong Kong residents’ feelings about the threat posed by a permeable border.3 From mainland China’s perspective, unruly Hong Kong symbolizes the promise of a more unfettered market, a less monitored society, and the advantages of the “rule of law.” However, its educational, legal, and political systems also threaten one-party rule and the certitude of social “harmony” assured by the great Internet firewall that maintains an illusion of ideological coherence. With each one suspicious of and yet fully dependent on the other, Hong Kong finds itself on the margins of an exponentially larger economy across the border, while Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong suffer from being marginalized as parasites and “locusts” who bring disease, buy up essentials such as baby formula, drive locals out of the property market by buying luxury condominiums, and strain social services ranging from transportation and hospitals to schools and public housing.

  • 4 G. Standing, The Precariat : The New Dangerous Class, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
  • 5 S. Ma, Meet Me in Venice : A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West, Lan (...)
  • 6 B. Latza Nadeau, “Italy’s Garment-Factory Slaves”, Daily Beast, 20 August 2013, https://www.thedail (...)

7Border-crossers traverse sexual, class, and income divides, and their intersectional identities create a broad spectrum of precarious legal, social, and economic positions. In The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Guy Standing points to Chinese migrant workers in Prato, Italy, as an example of the ways in which migration upends local class stratifications.4 A trickle that began in 1989 with fewer than forty workers increased exponentially over the years. Standing, in The Precariat, does not discuss the gender of Prato’s laborers. However, he eloquently explains the “feminization” of the global workforce in other contexts, and this can be seen in Prato as well. Although men and women work in these Prato sweatshops, female workers experience migration differently. In Meet Me in Venice : A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West, Suzanne Ma uncovers the extraordinary difficulties faced by female migrant laborers in Italy.5 Barbie Latza Nadeau points out in her article “Italy’s Garment-Factory Slaves” (2013) that Chinese women routinely face human trafficking, kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual harassment, and rape.6 Women migrant workers within China often face similar conditions, and gender plays a role in the politics of Hong Kong migration as well. Women navigate borders differently, and the intersection of gender with increasingly precarious economic relations created by globalization and neoliberal economic policies shape lives on both sides of the Hong Kong-mainland China border.

8In A Simple Life and Bends, the female characters lead lives marginalized by their gender as well as their relationship to the border. In A Simple Life, for example, Ah Tao relies on the economic fortunes of her employer Roger, whose livelihood increasingly depends on the health of the film industry in mainland China. After her stroke, she depends on the availability of cheaper, primarily female, labour from across the border to staff the nursing home in which she resides. In Bends, Anna’s fortunes follow her husband Leo’s success in China, until he mysteriously disappears. Her chauffeur’s wife ends up in the most precarious circumstances, since she depends on her Hong Kong-employed husband to find a way for her to deliver their second child across the border. When his employer’s family implodes, he struggles at the margins of the cross-border economy, forced to rely on the shaky status of his female boss.

Filming across Borders

9A Simple Life and Bends illustrate the particularly precarious nature of the economy for women behind the camera as well, since the financial relations illustrated in their films’ narratives parallel the world in which the creative talents behind the scenes operate. Mainland Chinese company PolyBona, with ties to the business branch of the People’s Liberation Army, partially funded A Simple Life, and Bona Group’s head, Yu Dong, makes a cameo appearance in the film. In fact, Hong Kong filmmakers share a history of cross-border production with the People’s Republic of China dating back decades, and they have considerable experience telling stories that reflect their own experiences as cross-border cultural workers.

  • 7 For more on this film in relation to Michelle Yeoh’s career, see T. Williams, “Michelle Yeoh : Unde (...)
  • 8 A. Heskins, “An Interview with Flora Lau (Bends)”, easternkicks.com, 5 November 2013, https://www.e (...)

10Before A Simple Life, Hui made Ah Kam (Stunt Woman, 1996), featuring Michelle Yeoh in the eponymous role, which also narrates a story about cross-border film production and the precarious nature of the Chinese-language film business.7 Many in Hui’s New Wave cohort maintain ties to mainland Chinese producers, and both A Simple Life and Bends draw on the same network of Hong Kong New Wave talent. Tsui Hark appears in Ann Hui’s film and his now ex-wife and longtime business partner Nansun Shi produced Bends. As a story based on the reminiscences of producer Roger Lee, who had worked with Ann Hui and Tsui Hark on other projects, A Simple Life contains several cameo appearances by other industry regulars including Sammo Hung and Anthony Wong. For Bends, the New Wave connections include Wong Kar-Wai’s regular cinematographer Christopher Doyle serving as the Director of Photography. Another Wong Kar-Wai collaborator, William Chang, known for his work as production designer, costumer, and editor in films by Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, Stanley Kwan, and Patrick Tam, assists as Art Director. Moreover, Flora Lau attended the same film school in London as Ann Hui, and she thanks her fellow alumna in the credits for Bends.8

  • 9 For more on cross-border film production, see M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “Mainlandization or Sinopho (...)
  • 10 R. Cheung, New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia, New Yor (...)
  • 11 E.C.M. Yau, “Watchful Partners, Hidden Currents : Hong Kong Cinema Moving into the Mainland of Chin (...)

11Being at the margins of mainland cinema enables the creative talent involved in both films to take advantage of networks that extend beyond China’s borders, since they speak English, enjoy fewer travel restrictions, and benefit from the cosmopolitanism of post-colonial Hong Kong society.9 As Ruby Cheung points out in her book New Hong Kong Cinema, A Simple Life (2016) made money on both sides of the border as well as within the regional market.10 Esther Yau notes in “Watchful Partners, Hidden Currents : Hong Kong Cinema Moving into the Mainland of China” (2015) that the brief appearance of Yu Dong in Hui’s film provides “a vignette of the budget-and-profit centered conversations and a mercenary approach as the centerpiece of mainland-centered partnerships after CEPA [2003 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement] came into effect.”11

  • 12 M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “To Work or Not To Work : The Dilemma of Hong Kong Film Labour in the Age (...)
  • 13 M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “Mainlandization and Neoliberalism with Post-colonial and Chinese Charact (...)

12The impact of CEPA can also be seen in scenes featuring Grasshopper (Anthony Wong) as a former stuntman/action choreographer who has moved into the more lucrative nursing home industry.12 As Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-Chung Chen point out in their research on the post-CEPA Hong Kong industry, the changes in production arrangements have hit below-the-line workers particularly hard, since they do not have the same level of expertise and celebrity as directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, and star performers.13 Roger and Grasshopper thereby navigate the cross-border economy as men in a male-dominated business; however, as Ah Tao, the Chinese title of A Simple Life, underscores, the narrative revolves around the eponymous Elder Sister Tao (Tao Jie, literally “peach sister” in English). Both Roger and his elderly domestic helper are, in essence, dependent on the volatile Chinese film business. They share a “simple life,” and the film draws a parallel between Ah Tao’s dependence on Roger and his dependence on China.

Keeping Up and Playing Down Appearances

13The film places both characters at the edges of Hong Kong society, and its peculiar charm relies on the notion that they share a cross-gender, cross-class, cross-generational bond. Wearing blue windbreakers, caps, and backpacks, Roger is mistaken for an air-conditioner repairman and a taxi driver as well as being unquestioningly accepted as his maid Ah Tao’s godson or nephew rather than employer. The ease with which Ah Tao can pass as his aunt with the application of a little make-up, jewelry, and hand-me-downs from Roger’s mother confirms that performing across the class divide does not take considerable skill in a society in which roller-coaster capitalism can boost or ruin prospects at the speed of light. Although the story of the faithful family servant and the loyal employer seems to belong to another age, their chameleon-like ability to cross classes speaks to the fracturing of identity in postmodern capitalism, where performativity overshadows any illusion of essence.

  • 14 The policy changed in October 2015 to allow most married couples a second child. For more on the On (...)

14In Bends, keeping up appearances takes on different connotations on each side of the border and at each level of the social hierarchy. Male chauffeur Fai hides his wife’s second pregnancy with a plan to sneak her from Shenzhen to Hong Kong in order to deliver the baby. In doing so, Fai and Ting Ting (Tian Yuan) hope to circumvent the punitive fees attached to having a forbidden second child under China’s One Child Policy in force at the time of the film’s production.14 They school their first child, daughter Hai Hai, to say that her mother has gone to visit her grandmother in their village. When Hai Hai eagerly tells a stranger, Fai tells her that she only needs to tell the story to those who ask about Ting Ting’s absence. As a preschooler, then, Hai Hai learns to perform a role necessitated by her family’s low class standing and inability to pay the fine for a younger sibling. Indeed, their marginal social position forces each member of the family into dishonesty. While ostensibly performing the role of the faithful husband and servant, Fai, in fact, does his best to seduce his former girlfriend, a nurse in a maternity hospital, and charm her into writing an admittance letter for his wife, just as he secretly steals parts from his employer’s Mercedes-Benz to help finance his scheme.

  • 15 T. Branigan, “Three die in tainted baby milk scandal in China”, The Guardian, 18 September 2008, ht (...)
  • 16 For an illuminating analysis of gender and geography in Bends, see D. Van de Velde, “On the Thresho (...)
  • 17 D. Van de Velde, op. cit., p. 196.

15Even though Fai possesses the proper documents to work in Hong Kong, his precarious economic circumstances lead him into the risky, underground shadow economy of counterfeit auto parts. However, his border town existence between Shenzhen and Hong Kong is concretely manifested on screen by the constant movement of people transporting cardboard cartons of goods and engaging in parallel trading of lucrative commodities such as infant milk powder. Topically referring to the 2008 scandal of melamine-tainted formula sickening thousands of babies in China and leading to several deaths due to kidney failure, Bends subtly uses hawkers in the background of its scenes at the Lo Wu checkpoint to highlight the endemic corruption underpinning cross-border society.15 Following a Hollywood screen tradition in which border towns signal crime and violence (e.g., Touch of Evil, 1958 ; Bordertown, 1935), Bends joins a number of films that take up the urban border shared by Hong Kong and mainland China in similar ways (e.g., Running on Karma, 2003 ; Durian Durian, 2000 ; Night and Fog, 2009 ; A Touch of Sin, 2013).16 As Danica Van de Velde observes in her analysis of Bends: “…the divisive issues of identity and belonging are continually emphasized through the camera’s focus on passports and identity documents, reinforcing the restrictions and obstacles to navigating both geographical and sociopolitical boundaries.”17

16Just as Fai puts on a show to hide his desperation, his employer, Anna, engages in a similar performance to hide the fact that she was abandoned by her husband Leo (Lawrence Cheng). Leo has left Anna scrounging for money and struggling to keep up the appearance of a prosperous and glamorous “trophy” wife or tai tai, the pampered spouse who displays the wealth of her bourgeois husband. Before Leo exits the picture, the film introduces Anna as adept at playing this role of socialite. She first appears on screen applying face powder in the backseat of her Mercedes-Benz while preparing for a dance class. The thematic connection between physical appearances and the superficiality of social class distinctions becomes subsequently clear when her hairdresser tells her that her credit card has been declined. She pays with cash instead, but losing the power and prestige of plastic to consume goods and services marks the beginning of her precipitous descent.

17Bends concretely displays the gendered nature of Anna’s class status through her dependence on her husband’s financial success and social standing. Her own upper-class identity, as a result, rests on Leo’s commitment to their marriage. Leo, in fact, blends gender, risk, and business when he criticises one of his associates by saying : “Why can’t you be more decisive ? You’re such a woman sometimes. Let’s go sign the deal.” The two men are seen chatting in the rear of a composition obscured by out-of-focus objects in the foreground, and the haze of the relationship between masculine potency, money, and women’s class standing clouds the few glimpses of Leo in the film.

18The film in fact shows only the consequences of his abandonment – useless credit cards, unpaid bills, frozen bank accounts, real estate agents demanding entry to put her home on the market, and a scramble to get as much cash out of their common property as possible before the entire façade of her life as a tai tai at the top of Hong Kong’s exclusive Victoria Peak crashes down around her. When Anna pays a visit to Leo’s office to try to find him, moving boxes and a view to the container port outside point to his investment in an economy marked by rapid change and the ability to pack up and relocate at a moment’s notice.

19The English title of the film plays on the homophone that connects the luxury car brand Mercedes-Benz to the crippling effects divers experience when rising too quickly in water. However, the Chinese title, which refers to crossing the border, alludes to another meaning of the word. As director Flora Lau explains:

  • 18 “Exclusive Interview With ‘Bends’ Director Flora Lau”, Hong Kong Hustle, November 2013, http://www. (...)

…I came up with that title because when I cross Hong Kong and Shenzhen, I always see the river. And the river is this really narrow bended river. That river really inspired me, the imagery of it, and what it means.
It’s such a small thing that can separate us SO much. So I wanted to name it after that curve, and also because of that sickness when you dive down and come up too quick. It kind of represents the people, the characters’ feelings.
18

20Both Fai and Anna, servant and mistress, mainland émigré and Hong Kong local, suffer from the twists and turns they experience as dependents in a household headed by an unreliable patriarch embodying the uncertainties of a new economy based on quick cross-border deals, counterfeit goods, and corruption.

21Coming up “too quick” in the social hierarchy, Anna has risen in society presumably through marriage. Her humble origins in one of Hong Kong’s squatter villages become clear in a scene in which she returns to visit her mother, who runs a small horticulture business specializing in potted plants. The contrast between Anna’s mother’s modest potted shrubs and her own exquisite bonsai tree collection speaks to the enormous cultural and social as well as economic chasm between the women. Performing as a tai tai, strutting around town in designer heels, carrying oversized and overpriced handbags while wearing stunning designer necklaces, stylish sunglasses and kaftan dresses, takes considerable effort, and Anna must stay on her guard to maintain her class status, which she owes, as argued, to her husband’s financial and social position.

22An expert at cultural and linguistic code-switching, Anna speaks to Fai in Cantonese or Mandarin and in English to her daughter, her Philippine domestic helper Rima, as well as her dog. Through the course of the film, Anna’s chameleon-like identity enables her to move through various social strata in a desperate quest to keep up her expensive lifestyle. Throughout Bends, Anna’s role as tai tai peals away as she descends into the gray areas of Hong Kong’s economy. In one scene, she goes to a casino, where she meets a man. She has sex with the high roller, steals money from him while he showers, and returns to her home to discover it has been ransacked. The juxtaposition of the two scenes indicates that Leo (perhaps Anna’s casino lover in disguise or in league with him) knew she would be out on the town long enough to get his belongings and key valuables without her knowledge. In another scene, Anna keeps an appointment with her circle of well-to-do female friends for tea at an exclusive café located at the Asia Society in Admiralty, a posh area on Hong Kong Island. She has sent Fai to cash a check so she can pay the bill and sweats anxiously through the conversation about teenagers, Facebook, and shoes before her chauffeur returns with the cash. Her ability to treat her friends cloaks her financially precarious circumstances.

The Precarity of the Glance

  • 19 L.G. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 201.

23In Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant notes that the concept of “precarity” has “become elastic, describing an affective atmosphere penetrating all classes,” which reflects “the process of society as a whole becoming more precarious and basically destabilized.”19 Berlant goes on to define a so-called “Cinema of Precarity” as follows:

  • 20 L.G. Berlant, op. cit., p. 201.

Returning to the hinge between the melodramatic realism associated with Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s and postwar Italian neorealism, the Cinema of Precarity melds melodrama and politics into a more reticent aesthetic to track the attrition of what had been sustaining national, social, economic, and political bonds and the abandonment of a variety of populations to being cast as waste…the films record the loneliness of collective singularity, the impacts of affective fraying, and the tiny optimism of recuperative gestures in the middle of it all, for those who can manage them.20

24This describes the aesthetic of both A Simple Life and Bends quite well. Visual restraint, attention to quotidian detail, and emotional excess come together to reinforce said “collective singularity” as traditional family structures disintegrate, older class hierarchies collapse, and men and women struggle at the border of an unpredictable economy. Anna, Fai, Ah Tao, and Roger all experience these struggles differently, and, although dependent on each other as employer and employee at the beginning of each film, their economic bonds weaken through the course of the narratives until they rupture completely.

  • 21 L. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16/3, 1975, p. 6-18. Mulvey revisits gaz (...)

25Ann Hui and Flora Lau communicate the gendered nature of their characters’ marginalization through the positioning of the camera and the composition of the mise-en-scene in a way that challenges visual norms associated with the “male gaze.” In 1975, Laura Mulvey defined the “male gaze” of classical Hollywood in terms of a visual power regime in which women serve as passive objects of heterosexual males’ active look.21 In those parts of the world where American film dominated the screens, the male gaze followed. However, Hui and Lau reveal a regime of looking that underscores women’s position at the periphery of the patriarchy in which they are dismissed by the “male glance.”

26Lili Loofbourow argues that the overinvestment in the male gaze minimizes women’s importance as fully functioning characters in narratives that only “glance” at them as human beings. In mainstream cinema, for example, a viewer’s perfunctory look at a female character enables the spectator to discern everything significant about her:

  • 22 L. Loofbourow, “The male glance : how we fail to take women’s stories seriously”, The Guardian, 6 M (...)

The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze. Rather than linger lovingly on the parts it wants most to penetrate, it looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed. It feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending – to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labour because our intuition is so searingly accurate that it doesn’t require it …Rather than investigate or discover, we point and classify.22

  • 23 J.-Fr. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minneso (...)

27Indeed, the glance may be more damaging than the gaze since domestic figures such as the housemaid and the trophy wife can easily be categorized and dismissed. A Simple Life and Bends begin with Roger and Leo merely glancing at Ah Tao and Anna, and the female protagonists only really get a peek at the men so central to their livelihoods as their stories begin to unfold. Rich and poor, these dependent women remain at the edges of Hong Kong society as an afterthought in what the late Jean-François Lyotard might have called the “grand narrative” of the “rise” of China in the 21st century.23

  • 24 For more on the ‘woman’s film’ see M. Haskell, From Reverence to Rape : The Treatment of Women in t (...)
  • 25 See Th. Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” and L. Mulvey, “ (...)

28In a male-defined world of public action, women find themselves consigned to the seclusion of the private sphere. In the so-called “woman’s film”24 aimed at female audiences, with women embroiled in romantic or family dramas, domestic spaces serve as physical symbols of the female protagonists’ class status and state of mind.25 In both Bends and A Simple Life, the women – mistress and servant – take the lead in organising household objects as well as setting domestic routines. However, the domestic sphere remains marginal in a world that demands public engagement with the global economy. Men simply glance at women in the kitchen before moving out into the world.

29The last glimpse Anna has of Leo, for example, comes early in Bends.

Figure 1. With an insouciant grin, Leo pokes his head through the frosted glass partition in the following scene to grab a snack on his way out the door – and out of Anna’s life in Bends. Frame grab

Figure 1. With an insouciant grin, Leo pokes his head through the frosted glass partition in the following scene to grab a snack on his way out the door – and out of Anna’s life in Bends. Frame grab

30The partition separates her domestic sphere of consumption from her husband’s public role as provider, and the haziness of the barrier between these gendered spaces parallels the narrative’s failure to give any specific reasons for Leo’s decision to leave Anna and liquidate all their shared property. He may have gambled on a risky venture and lost, or he may plan to use bankruptcy to hide assets in a divorce; Anna, however, experiences Leo’s disappearance as sudden, unexpected, and irrational.

31In A Simple Life, Roger, too, merely glances at the faithful servant he takes for granted before Ah Tao’s stroke separates them. In an early scene, Ah Tao serves Roger his meal of steamed fish, crab, and seasonal vegetables, which she carefully selected at the local wet market, at the kitchen table. Roger takes her service for granted and does not bother to look at her as she provides his meal.

Figure 2. Roger takes Ah Tao’s service for granted and does not bother to glance at her as she provides his meal in A Simple Life. Frame grab

Figure 2. Roger takes Ah Tao’s service for granted and does not bother to glance at her as she provides his meal in A Simple Life. Frame grab

32He eats his dessert with his tea and fruit in the living room, and they chat as Ah Tao stands in the doorway eating her own bowl of rice for supper. Their conversation revolves around food, and Ah Tao warns that the ox tongue Roger craves contravenes doctor’s orders to stay away from fatty meats because of his cardiac condition. However, close ups of the preparation of the dish speak to the fact that Ah Tao cannot deny the “young” master his wish. Later, after Ah Tao moves to the nursing home, Roger’s middle-aged friends discover the delicacy in the freezer and call the cook to reminisce with her about their youth. Out of sight, only traces of Ah Tao’s existence remain in Roger’s apartment.

33When she suffers her stroke, Ah Tao is on duty near the washing machine in the kitchen, and, later, Ah Tao and Roger go through her personal effects in the same room. The first five dollars she earned in service, Roger’s embroidered baby sling, and his movie magazines that were forbidden by his strict parents all speak to her role as part of the warmth and succor of the kitchen. After her hospitalisation, Ah Tao’s relationship with her now former employer changes, and they sit together sharing a newly discovered intimacy.

Figure 3. Roger and Ah Tao sit together sharing a newly discovered intimacy in A Simple Life. Frame grab

Figure 3. Roger and Ah Tao sit together sharing a newly discovered intimacy in A Simple Life. Frame grab

34Gazing at the remnants of a shared past, Ah Tao and Roger gradually become able to look at each other more genuinely.

Domesticity at the Border

35When Roger searches for Ah Tao’s replacement, he is startled by the realisation that migrant labour has changed the nature of domestic service. He comes to appreciate the fact that no one can compete with Ah Tao, and, in a comic scene in which the retired maid interviews prospective replacements, the women clearly cannot measure up to her high standards. The applicants refuse to do dangerous work such as cleaning windows, touch men’s underwear, serve guests, cook rice in clay pots rather than electric rice cookers, and buy fresh seafood according to a strict schedule. Rather than hire any of these prospective domestic helpers, frugal Roger takes up Ah Tao’s house cleaning duties and even helps to clean her room at the nursing home. However, he never quite manages to match her cooking skills, so Roger takes Ah Tao to dine at the local cha chaan teng (neighborhood diner) and later in the film is even seen eating bowls of noodles out of Styrofoam containers.

36Bends portrays the changing nature of the domestic sphere in a more affluent environment. As hostess, Anna commands her kitchen with Rima, her Filipina domestic helper, on hand to help. However, Anna’s life, as wife and mother, revolves around the living room and bedrooms more than the kitchen. The clutter in her daughter’s room, vacated because she went to study abroad, and the devastation of Anna’s own bedroom concretize the chaos of her life after Leo’s disappearance. To restore a sense of balance in her life, Anna calls in a feng shui master who uses an elaborate wheel to calculate the best positions for her household objects. He recommends changing the direction of her bed, purchasing gold elephants to guard her door, and for her to wear more purple. She enlists Rima to help with moving the furniture, including a heavy marble fountain; however, the advice does not improve Anna’s circumstances. A shot of the frame empty of the elegant Chinese landscape painting that previously dominated the living room concretizes Anna’s loss.

Figure 4. An elegant Chinese landscape painting dominates the living room in Bends. Frame grab

Figure 4. An elegant Chinese landscape painting dominates the living room in Bends. Frame grab

Figure 5. Its disappearance marks the loss of Anna’s class standing. Frame grab

Figure 5. Its disappearance marks the loss of Anna’s class standing. Frame grab

37Eventually, she packs up the antique art objects her husband left behind to sell to a dealer across the border in Shenzhen – moving, like her chauffeur, into the shadow economy of cash for Chinese antiquities. As she packs up vases and scrolls, she packages these precious artefacts to monetize her own cultural capital. Visually, as Anna wraps up these markers of her husband’s good taste, the composition narrows to box her in as well. Implicitly she so becomes another decorative object to be traded, commenting on the narrow confines of her formerly pampered life now closing in on her.

Figure 6. Anna boxed in along with the objects she wraps for sale in Bends. Frame grab

Figure 6. Anna boxed in along with the objects she wraps for sale in Bends. Frame grab

38The difference between Anna’s and Fai’s homes provides a concrete contrast in class circumstances in Bends. Modest, but far from dilapidated, what stands out in the Shenzhen apartment involves Ting Ting’s attempts to conceal her presence from the neighbours. She artfully uses screens as well as newspaper and magazine clippings to obscure the view from the windows. However, whether these attempts to use collage to hide her pregnancy draws more rather than less attention to the inhabitants of the flat remains moot.

Figure 7. Ting Ting artfully uses newspaper and magazine clippings to obscure the view from the windows in Bends. Frame grab

Figure 7. Ting Ting artfully uses newspaper and magazine clippings to obscure the view from the windows in Bends. Frame grab

39Ann Hui and Flora Lau use ‘empty’ shots of spaces devoid of human inhabitants to comment on loss, emptiness, and the melancholy at the heart of A Simple Life and Bends. In A Simple Life, the camera lingers on the vacant living room couch or the interior of the apartment after the characters leave the frame. In Bends, an empty shot of a small bonsai tree on a table in front of a window, framing a mountain, between two chairs flanked by curtains, speaks to the serenity of a natural order that transcends the impending collapse of Anna’s bourgeois household. Objects take on a life of their own outside the drama and comment on the transitory quality of life and the precariousness of the characters’ material circumstances.

Class and Care

40A Simple Life and Bends stage key parts of their narratives in care institutions. In Bends, Fai struggles to get his wife admitted to a maternity center in Hong Kong, and the film details his frustration as he makes repeated trips to several health facilities in vain. In A Simple Life, Roger shops for a suitable nursing home for Ah Tao, and the preponderance of the film chronicles her life there before her death. Taken together, the films cover birth and death through Hong Kong care institutions and uncover the role money and class clout play in defining women’s biological lives.

  • 26 For more on Night and Fog, see G. Marchetti, “Feminism, Postfeminism, and Hong Kong Women Filmmaker (...)

41Director Ann Hui is no stranger to stories dealing with Hong Kong’s aging population. Her acclaimed 1995 feature Summer Snow deals with a middle-aged woman (the Chinese title of the film is Woman at Forty), played by actress Josephine Siao, who cares for her elderly father-in-law with Alzheimer’s disease, precisely because she cannot find a suitable care facility to take him after his wife’s death. In A Simple Life, Hui continues her authorial interest in both aging and social institutions – a topic she meticulously covered in Night and Fog, a searing drama on spousal abuse, which takes a victim of domestic violence on a journey from a battered women’s shelter to the office of a social worker, district councillor, and police officer before she meets her death at the hands of her abusive husband.26

42From the moment the ambulance transports Ah Tao to the hospital after her initial stroke to her deathbed in the film’s penultimate scene before her funeral, A Simple Life offers a detailed picture of the ways in which elderly women move through Hong Kong’s system of institutionalized care. This aspect of the film balances its more mundane treatment of Roger’s increasingly intimate relationship with the family’s loyal maid. As Ah Tao moves outside the domestic sphere, her world expands, and director Hui uses this opportunity to explore the operation of the nursing home as a for-profit institution as well as a microcosm of Hong Kong’s social stratifications.

  • 27 For more on the importance of these personal connections to the fabric of contemporary Chinese soci (...)

43When Ah Tao announces from her hospital bed that she wants to retire and live in a nursing home, Roger agrees to help her. Although she offers to pay for the facility herself, Roger knows that he needs to foot the bill, subtly indicating that government subsidies supplemented by a domestic servant’s meager savings would not provide suitable care. In fact, as Roger shops for a nursing home for Ah Tao, the lucrative nature of the business in caring for Hong Kong’s aging population becomes abundantly clear. After haggling with the saleswoman at one facility, only Roger’s unexpected personal connection to his old friend Grasshopper gives him confidence in the deal he strikes to secure a private room, with no extra charges for heating or air-conditioning, and discounted supplementary services for Ah Tao. Even with his “guanxi” personal connections, Roger has only managed to place Ah Tao in a mediocre facility.27 Her “room” is a partitioned cubicle with a curtain serving as a door offering only minimal privacy. Although she feeds herself at the communal dinner table, other residents sit in an assembly line to be spoon-fed by an attendant wheeling from person to person in an office chair. Ah Tao’s journey to the bathroom for her first night proves particularly challenging as she hobbles to the toilet only to find that she must return to her room for tissue paper. To guard against the smell, she stuffs two wads of paper into her nostrils before entering the cubicle.

44Given that poor Hong Kong seniors often opt to move to mainland China to retire because of the much lower cost of living, all the residents in the nursing home appear to be vaguely “middle-class” by local standards. However, the film still uncovers a distinct class hierarchy. The oldest resident, for example, sits at the bottom, abandoned by a family that has left Hong Kong, and completely dependent on a small government allowance. At the highest rung, the Headmaster (Leung Tin) also seems isolated, but his dapper attire and a scene in which he leaves the facility in the company of a male Filipino helper indicate that he has financial means in addition to the cultural capital he flaunts by reciting classical Chinese poetry.

45Passing as Roger’s godmother, Ah Tao floats outside the home’s social hierarchy. A visit from Roger’s mother brings a precious gift of birds’ nest soup to share. Residents assume Ah Tao is well-to-do and turn to her for financial help, but her skill with a needle also puts her in demand for domestic chores such as sewing buttons. She cleans her own room, but is tapped for cash by a male resident, Uncle Kin (Paul Chun), who uses the money to feed his sex addiction with a neighbourhood prostitute. When Roger discovers where the money went he attempts to clue Ah Tao in, but she already knows about Kin’s vices and simply enjoys seeing him have some fun while he can. Vacillating between a maid and a matron, Ah Tao occupies a unique position in the nursing home as a single woman enjoying a close relationship with her former employer and patron Roger. Moreover, her unmarried status frees her from the constraints placed on widows in traditional Chinese households. Rather than being required to maintain a respectable veneer of bourgeois or Confucian propriety, Ah Tao can do as she pleases with her time and limited finances.

46The residents, however, represent only one part of the class order in operation in the institution. Grasshopper staffs his facility with cheap labour from across the border, and Ms. Choi (played by PRC actress Qin Hailu) manages the facility but still offers to clean Roger’s apartment to supplement her obviously inadequate wages. Fortunes may be rising in mainland China for businessmen like Yu Dong, but even professional women such as Ms. Choi struggle economically as they negotiate their economic prospects between the HKSAR and the PRC.

47In Bends, too, the border exacerbates class divisions, and Fai struggles to find a maternity hospital for his wife because she does not have a Hong Kong resident’s permit and he does not have the cash to pay her way into a private care facility. Fai spends considerable time in waiting rooms in hope of finding a clinic he can afford. One scene provides particularly poignant insight into the futility of his quest. It begins with a close-up of Fai in yet another reception area. He overhears a salesman speaking in Mandarin with a couple about having their baby in Hong Kong. Many agencies in the PRC profit not only from clients’ desires to have a second child under the radar, but also market in the dream attached to the “anchor baby,” whose legal residence in Hong Kong, or other territories outside mainland China, offers the possibility to relocate the entire family in the future.

  • 28 See J. Steinfeld, Little Emperors and Material Girls : Sex and Youth in Modern China, London, I.B. (...)

48The sales representative promises to “provide the full service” for the expectant couple, including a car to a hotel guaranteed to be five minutes from the maternity hospital. The father-to-be asks about the birth certificate, while Fai watches kids play in the waiting room, underscoring the fact that the children to be born in Hong Kong are not firstborn. The salesman tells the couple that Hong Kong associates will handle the birth certificate, ensuring that the child is legally registered. The young boy noisily playing in the waiting room does not care that he will soon be the only one in school with a younger sibling. As the embodiment of the spoiled “little emperors” created by China’s One-Child Policy, he prefers to keep his parents exclusively to himself.28 Shots of a manila envelope bulging with cash, and a currency machine noisily counting out the bills makes it clear that Fai cannot afford the cost, and he gets up to leave before he speaks to anyone on staff. Money determines the circumstances surrounding births as well as deaths in the cash economy, and economic class dictates access to private as well as subsidized facilities at beginning and end of life on both sides of the Chinese border.

Gender Investments

49Perhaps the most salient element uniting the families depicted in both films involves the characters’ acceptance of the traditional Chinese gender hierarchy that favours males over females. As A Simple Life and Bends both point out, this investment sometimes pays off, but very often the rewards of favouring men over women do not compensate for the sacrifices involved in maintaining patriarchal privilege. Women depend on men and rely on male investment in the family, which puts women in a particularly precarious position in an uncertain and volatile economy where men continue to earn more than women.

  • 29 See L. Lim’s article, “Where Hong Kong got ‘amah’, old word for maidservant, from”, Post Magazine, (...)

50In A Simple Life, for example, the characters openly discuss the inequities of the system. Ah Tao would likely not have been abandoned as an infant and sent into domestic service as a youngster had she been male. The institution of the “black-and-white amah” has deep roots in Hong Kong’s colonial connections to Macau, India, and elsewhere in Asia where the term “amah” may connote a wet nurse in Portuguese or a “little mother” in Chinese.29 Many of the women who went into domestic service wore “uniforms” of white Mandarin tunics over black trousers with their hair coiffed in braids. Some sworn spinsters known as “self-combed” women were escaping arranged marriages, and an unknown number cultivated lesbian relationships. Ah Tao wears plaid shirts, blue jackets, and oversized trousers that appear to be hand-me-downs from Roger. Moreover, she shuns Uncle Kin’s suggestion that she accompany him across the border to Shenzhen to check out a marriage market for senior citizens, and she appears to accept her spinsterhood with good humour when she compares her decision not to marry to Roger’s confirmed bachelorhood.

51While enjoying certain liberties because of her unmarried status, it does not free her from economic dependence on others. As the film’s Chinese title indicates, Ah Tao can also be addressed as “elder sister,” and her fictive position in Roger’s family translates into a social position dependent on the fortunes of his family. Like all members of Roger’s large, extended, diasporic family, Ah Tao enjoys a valued place as an elder. Roger’s American-based relatives include her on their itinerary when they visit the former colony, as well as phone calls during the Lunar New Year holidays. When Ah Tao informs the nursing home residents that her family lives in the United States, she tells only a partial lie. When the colonial institution of servitude functions ideally, it does provide for these trusted female servants in perpetuity. Ah Tao may feel awkward when Roger’s nephew’s Korean-American wife hugs her, but she happily takes her place in the family photo with four generations, including the Asian American couple’s little boy dressed in traditional Korean clothing for his first birthday.

52Ah Tao reaps the benefits of the two ethical-religious systems that determine her relationship with Roger – dynastic Chinese Confucianism and British colonial Christianity. Hong Kong provides a cultural melting pot in which various religious and philosophical positions overlap and reinforce each other. In the case of traditional beliefs associated with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, Christian parallels can be found and have been encouraged by missionaries who came to Hong Kong to shore up the colonial system. When Roger’s sister rightly points out that Ah Tao favoured him as a boy during their childhood and connects it to his decision to take care of her in her old age, Roger counters that he feels an obligation to reward her for sticking by him during his heart attack. The Confucian sense of filial piety overlaps with a Christian duty to “love thy neighbour” and Ah Tao benefits as an elder. However, the coca colas, forbidden movie magazines, and scrupulous attention to Roger’s culinary preferences ensured a closer connection between the amah and her male charge than with the young girls in her care.

53Director Hui, however, carefully contrasts Ah Tao and Roger with another case in the elder care facility. Mrs. Kam clearly favours her son, who has abandoned her, while she shuns her filial daughter who dutifully visits. When the errant son neglects to pay his mother’s bill, the daughter complains, but Mrs. Kam refuses to believe her son will not acknowledge his obligations. Later, the old woman refuses to go home with her daughter for the Lunar New Year because she deluded herself into believing her son plans to spend the holiday with her. When Mrs. Kam dies, only her daughter comes to the nursing home to pick up her effects, while the son clearly has no sentimental feelings about his mother’s passing.

54In fact, throughout the film, although women do support each other, their efforts appear to be in vain. For example, a young female resident of the nursing facility needs to be there in order to operate a kidney dialysis machine. Attended by her mother, the two women clearly lack the funds for better medical care, and they cry when a doctor orders them to leave the nursing home because the equipment seems to be inadequate. The young woman’s empty room and elimination from the film’s diegesis do not bode well, since the women seem unable to find the money for proper medical attention in a system subsidized inadequately by the city’s government. Women without male patronage, in fact, suffer inordinately as a result, and this can be seen in both A Simple Life and Bends.

55In Bends, patriarchal privilege dominates on both sides of the border. Fai and Ting Ting feel the need for a boy, since, presumably, they cannot count on Hai Hai’s ability to care for them when they grow older. With neoliberal reforms, China’s social safety net has weakened, and individuals can no longer depend on the commune or the state-run factory to provide pensions or retirement housing. Ting Ting risks arrest, injury, or even death to cross the border to give birth in Hong Kong. Fai nervously drives the Mercedes-Benz through the border checkpoint and, luckily, the car breaks down on the Hong Kong side. Miraculously, Ting Ting emerges from the trunk of the car in labour, and Fai manages to flag down a taxi to take her to the emergency room as planned.

  • 30 L.G. Berlant, op.cit., pp. 201–202.

56While Fai and Ting Ting’s fortunes may be on the rise at the end of Bends, Anna has pinned all her hopes on a man who has proven to be unreliable. No longer the pampered tai tai dependent on the fortunes of a prosperous spouse, Anna takes her bags out of the broken-down Mercedes-Benz and walks off towards an uncertain future. Anna as the Hong Kong socialite in Bends, as well as Ah Tao as the faithful amah in A Simple Life, both end up as fading relics of a patriarchal past. And yet, they do not point to a feminist future. Rather, as China’s post-Reform Era neoliberal capitalism has created a new class structure based on global economic uncertainty, women’s lives continue to be dependent on the class standing of their husbands, male relatives, or employers; their homes subject to the vicissitudes of the real estate market, and their prospects as wives, mothers, or employees subject still to patriarchal constraints. At opposite ends of the class divide, Ah Tao and Anna serve as reminders of the continuing perils of precarity in an uncertain economic order. The films thus speak to what Lauren Berlant has termed “new potential conditions of solidarity emerging from subjects not with similar historical identities or social locations but with similar adjustment styles to the pressures of the emergent new ordinariness.”30

57Seeing precarity through women’s eyes, Hui and Lau point to ways of comprehending the visual politics of the Chinese-speaking world from a perspective too often pushed to the margins of global cinema. For audiences watching their films beyond Hong Kong, Flora Lau and Ann Hui provide a way of experiencing a sense of “optimism” no matter how “cruel” life is at the cinematic borders of the Chinese-speaking world. While the international film festival circuit historically has marginalized female directors, Flora Lau’s debut of Bends at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and the premiere of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in 2011 indicate that these films are making inroads into male-dominated screen culture. Indeed, A Simple Life was nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice; lead actress Deanie Ip won the Volpi Cup; and the film secured various other awards including the La Navicella Award (for “human values”), the Equal Opportunities Award, and Honorable Mention for the Roman Catholic SIGNIS award. In 2020, Hui became the first Chinese woman director to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Venice International Film Festival. While moving closer to the center of world cinema, female-directed films about women at the margins of the Chinese-speaking world remain at the borders of world cinema. However, they speak to gender and class hierarchies at the heart of contemporary global capitalism by acknowledging the precariousness of an existence that extends beyond the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China.

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Bibliographie

Berlant L.G., Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.

Branigan T., “Three die in tainted baby milk scandal in China”, The Guardian, 18 September 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/18/china (accessed 4 April 2021).

Cheung R., New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia, New York, Berghahn Books, 2016.

Crenshaw K., “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 1989, pp. 139–67. Reprinted in Kairys D. (ed.), The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, New York, Pantheon, 1990, pp. 195–217.

Elsaesser Th., “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama”, in Gledhill, C. (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London, British Film Institute, 1987, pp. 43–69.

“Exclusive Interview With ‘Bends’ Director Flora Lau”, Hong Kong Hustle, November 2013, http://www.hongkonghustle.com/movies/15776/bends-flora-lau-hong-kong-movie-hk-carina-chen-kun-christopher-doyle/ (accessed 4 April 2021).

Fong M., One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Haskell M., From Reverence to Rape : The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Heskins A., “An Interview with Flora Lau (Bends)”, easternkicks.com, 5 November 2013, https://www.easternkicks.com/features/an-interview-with-flora-lau-bends (accessed 4 April 2021).

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Kleinhans Ch., “Notes on Melodrama and the Family under Capitalism”, in Landy M. (ed), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 197–204.

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Loofbourow, L., “The male glance : how we fail to take women’s stories seriously”, The Guardian, 6 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/06/the-male-glance-how-we-fail-to-take-womens-stories-seriously (accessed 4 April 2021).

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Ma S., Meet Me in Venice : A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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Marchetti G., “Feminism, Postfeminism, and Hong Kong Women Filmmakers”, in Cheung E.M.K., Marchetti G. and Yau E.C.M. (eds.), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2015, pp. 237-264.

Mulvey L., “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16/3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

Mulvey L., “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama”, in Gledhill C. (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London, British Film Institute, 1987, pp. 75–82.

Mulvey L., “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)”, in Thornham, S. (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 122–130.

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Films

Ah Kam [阿金; a.k.a. Stuntwoman], Dir. Ann Hui, 1996.

Bends [過界], Dir. Flora Lau, 2013.

Bordertown, Dir. Archie Mayo, 1935.

Durian, Durian [榴槤飄飄], Dir. Fruit Chan, 2000.

Intimates [自梳], Dir. Jacob Cheung, 1997.

Night and Fog [天水圍的夜與霧], Dir. Ann Hui, 2009.

One Child Nation, Dir. Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, 2019.

Running on Karma, [大隻佬], Dir. Johnnie To and Ka-fai Wai, 2003.

A Simple Life [桃姐], Dir. Ann Hui, 2011.

Summer Snow [女人四十], Dir. Ann Hui, 1995.

Touch of Evil, Dir. Orson Welles, 1958.

A Touch of Sin [天注定], Dir. Zhangke Jia, 2013.

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Notes

1 Research for this article was partially funded by a GRF (General Research Fund) award, “Gendered Screens, Chinese Dreams: Women Filmmakers and the Rise of China in the Twenty-First Century,” Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, 2019-2021. (HKU17612818) Many thanks to Georgina Challen and Louis Lu Yu, who helped prepare this article for publication.

2 K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 1989, pp. 139–167. Reprinted in D. Kairys (ed.), The Politics of Law :  A Progressive Critique, New York, Pantheon, 1990, pp. 195–217.

3 The bill was withdrawn, but the People’s Republic of China imposed the sweeping National Security Law on the HKSAR on July 1, 2020, in its place.

4 G. Standing, The Precariat : The New Dangerous Class, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

5 S. Ma, Meet Me in Venice : A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

6 B. Latza Nadeau, “Italy’s Garment-Factory Slaves”, Daily Beast, 20 August 2013, https://www.thedailybeast.com/italys-garment-factory-slaves (accessed 4 April 2021).

7 For more on this film in relation to Michelle Yeoh’s career, see T. Williams, “Michelle Yeoh : Under Eastern Eyes”, Asian Cinema, 12/2, 2001, pp. 119–131.

8 A. Heskins, “An Interview with Flora Lau (Bends)”, easternkicks.com, 5 November 2013, https://www.easternkicks.com/features/an-interview-with-flora-lau-bends (accessed 4 April 2021).

9 For more on cross-border film production, see M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “Mainlandization or Sinophone Translocality ? Challenges for Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema”, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 6/2, 2012, pp. 115–134. 

10 R. Cheung, New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-century East Asia, New York, Berghan Books, 2016.

11 E.C.M. Yau, “Watchful Partners, Hidden Currents : Hong Kong Cinema Moving into the Mainland of China”, in E.M.K. Cheung, G. Marchetti and E.C.M. Yau (eds.), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2015, p. 35.

12 M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “To Work or Not To Work : The Dilemma of Hong Kong Film Labour in the Age of Mainlandization”, Jump Cut : A Review of Contemporary Media, 55, 2013. (http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc55.2013/SzetoChenHongKong/index.html) (accessed 4 April 2021).

13 M.M. Szeto and Y.C. Chen, “Mainlandization and Neoliberalism with Post-colonial and Chinese Characteristics: Challenges for the Hong Kong Film Industry”, in J. Kapur and K.B. Wagner (eds.), Neoliberalism and global cinema: capital, culture, and Marxist critique, New York, Routledge, 2011, pp. 239–260.

14 The policy changed in October 2015 to allow most married couples a second child. For more on the One Child Policy, see M. Fong, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016; see also N. Wang and J. Zhang’s documentary One Child Nation (2019).

15 T. Branigan, “Three die in tainted baby milk scandal in China”, The Guardian, 18 September 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/18/china (accessed 4 April 2021).

16 For an illuminating analysis of gender and geography in Bends, see D. Van de Velde, “On the Threshold: Urban Exchange and Intervention in Flora Lau’s Bends (2013)”, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 11/1, 2017, pp. 180–205.

17 D. Van de Velde, op. cit., p. 196.

18 “Exclusive Interview With ‘Bends’ Director Flora Lau”, Hong Kong Hustle, November 2013, http://www.hongkonghustle.com/movies/15776/bends-flora-lau-hong-kong-movie-hk-carina-chen-kun-christopher-doyle/ (accessed 4 April 2021).

19 L.G. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 201.

20 L.G. Berlant, op. cit., p. 201.

21 L. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16/3, 1975, p. 6-18. Mulvey revisits gaze theory in her 1982 article, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” (in S. Thornham [ed.], Feminist Film Theory : A Reader, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 122–130) in which she takes into account the experience of the female spectator oscillating between male and female perspectives. In an important contribution to gaze theory, bell hooks noted that the ‘oppositional gaze’ associated with spectators such as African American women who seldom see themselves on screen for any length of time highlights the intersectional power dynamics at play in Hollywood visual culture (see Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, South End Press, 1992). In 2016, Jill Soloway delivered a passionate speech on the topic of the ‘female gaze,’ which updates the concept for the 21st century (see “The Female Gaze” TIFF : Master Class, Topple Productions, 11 September 2016, https://www.toppleproductions.com/the-female-gaze) (accessed 4 April 2021).

22 L. Loofbourow, “The male glance : how we fail to take women’s stories seriously”, The Guardian, 6 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/06/the-male-glance-how-we-fail-to-take-womens-stories-seriously (accessed 4 April 2021).

23 J.-Fr. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

24 For more on the ‘woman’s film’ see M. Haskell, From Reverence to Rape : The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 153–188.

25 See Th. Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” and L. Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama”, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is : Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London, British Film Institute, 1987, pp. 43–69 and pp. 75–82, as well as Ch. Kleinhans, “Notes on Melodrama and the Family under Capitalism”, in M. Landy (ed.), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 197–204.

26 For more on Night and Fog, see G. Marchetti, “Feminism, Postfeminism, and Hong Kong Women Filmmakers”, in E.M.K. Cheung, G. Marchetti and E.C.M. Yau (eds.), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2015, pp. 237–264.

27 For more on the importance of these personal connections to the fabric of contemporary Chinese society, see M.M.H. Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.

28 See J. Steinfeld, Little Emperors and Material Girls : Sex and Youth in Modern China, London, I.B. Tauris, 2015.

29 See L. Lim’s article, “Where Hong Kong got ‘amah’, old word for maidservant, from”, Post Magazine, 4 November 2016, https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/2042648/where-hong-kong-got-amah-old-word-maidservant (accessed 4 April 2021). Jacob Cheung’s Intimates (1997) also focuses on a Chinese woman in domestic service.

30 L.G. Berlant, op.cit., pp. 201–202.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. With an insouciant grin, Leo pokes his head through the frosted glass partition in the following scene to grab a snack on his way out the door – and out of Anna’s life in Bends. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 328k
Titre Figure 2. Roger takes Ah Tao’s service for granted and does not bother to glance at her as she provides his meal in A Simple Life. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 284k
Titre Figure 3. Roger and Ah Tao sit together sharing a newly discovered intimacy in A Simple Life. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 284k
Titre Figure 4. An elegant Chinese landscape painting dominates the living room in Bends. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 516k
Titre Figure 5. Its disappearance marks the loss of Anna’s class standing. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 520k
Titre Figure 6. Anna boxed in along with the objects she wraps for sale in Bends. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 304k
Titre Figure 7. Ting Ting artfully uses newspaper and magazine clippings to obscure the view from the windows in Bends. Frame grab
URL http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/docannexe/image/742/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 412k
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Référence papier

Gina Marchetti, « Intersections of Gender, Generation, and Class at Hong Kong’s Border: Precarious Peripheries in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013) »Sextant, 38 | 2022, 21-42.

Référence électronique

Gina Marchetti, « Intersections of Gender, Generation, and Class at Hong Kong’s Border: Precarious Peripheries in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013) »Sextant [En ligne], 38 | 2022, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2022, consulté le 26 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/742 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.742

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Auteur

Gina Marchetti

Gina Marchetti is Chair of the Department of Humanities and Media Studies (HMS) in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute. She is the author of Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (California, 1993), From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (Temple, 2006), The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (Temple, 2012), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS—The Trilogy (HKUP, 2007), and Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (Hawai’i, 2018).

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