I worry about my own blogging sometimes. I should put a warning on it ‘things look bigger on line than they really are’.

Craig
E1

So yes, vision of China is right. I’ve not seen the film but know that one of the story’s motifs is cinema (Chang was a reviewer and scriptwriter for some of the most influential independent studios in the 40s(China) and 60s (Hong Kong). Importantly, she wrote Lust Caution much later in her career while living in Hong Kong (the preferred city of exile for Shanghai’s ‘wantonly’ cosmopolitan artists, the ‘new’ Shanghai, etc). The spy drama is important: the interior “personal” passages of her fiction, that don’t, I imagine, quite make it to Lee’s screen version, would be as mistrustful of, or at least compromised by, national feeling / identification as they are of the colonized spaces that her characters inhabit, this all playing out as a romance script of course, because that’s what the ladies ‘get away’ with as literary concern. Which is just to say that the hetro spy drama genre is important.

Rey Chow writes about this stuff VERY well – contemporary Chinese cinema’s sentimentality being not about revolution but about compromise, not radical departure but moderation, endurance, and accommodation. i.e. sentimentality has uses in prescribing ‘national’ readings to a global cinema audience.

Which is just to say that to be exploring ‘Chineseness’, through Ang Lee, after thinking about dubious feelings of authenticity and belonging at an Aussie China town New Year is perfect, because it will get you in a lot of trouble. For the record your experience of it would have been more in the spirit of Eileen Chang than Ang Lee. Perhaps she would have enjoyed the colours and sounds a bit more, but heaving chest amidst desolate feeling was Chang’s thing.

Do academics still use quotation marks to note emphasis and loaded/ironic usage? Or was that just a nineties thing. I tried to delete them but they need to be there.

The shortened version of this post, btw, would have been something like, LADY!, you totally missed this: http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang

Which makes _me_ sad about Brisbane. A little.
Rx