Vernacular Modernisms

Hansen’s conception of confluent (local) modernities having produced  vernacular (local) modernisms whereas classical Hollywood produced the “first global vernacular” (10) is a rather problematic but still useful starting point for analyzing a relationship between the cinematic constructions/representations of the Chinese woman in The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West (1916) and The Goddess (1934). The dominant ahistorical conception of film as an artform as essentially (thus controversially) heterogeneous as music but somehow homogenized into a “universal language” (12) taught by classical Hollywood is something she explicitly avoids reifying then proceeds to, under the mercurial moniker of modernity. While her thesis- claiming various modernities arose out of various local (cultural) industrial, material, and traditional contexts rather than assuming, as an a priori, that they are only responding to Western hegemony and overrepresentation- may have been novel in 2000, compared to similar arguments made since then and by scholars who actually lived in these contexts (such as Hamid Dabashi’s analysis of Dariush Mehrjui’s Gaav in Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema) it is very clear that critical analysis itself is also situated within the author’s local context and construction of modernity. Luckily, whether her term global vernacular holds academic value (whether it is characteristically distinct from D. W. Griffith’s paternalist universal language) is unnecessary to determine for this argument, since the concept of various vernacular modernisms is sufficient in character to describe the local contexts of 1930s Shanghai and 1910s Oakland.

When the Far East Mingles with the West

This argument will examine how and why The Curse of Quon Gwon and The Goddess represent such disparate vernacular modernisms when they ostensibly reflect the same traditional Chinese confrontation with Western modernity. It says a lot that with five of the original seven reels and the intertitles missing, Wong’s text still manages to indict its source of melodramatic conflict more than Yonggang’s. The national context of censorship for his film will be elaborated later, but the history of The Curse’s exhibition and distribution demonstrates how the issue of preservation is inextricably linked to the issue of censorship. The problem here is not simply how “classical” filmic representations of communities and their conflicts could have been dramatized without obfuscating the very real mechanisms of power that engender their conflict, but also how many very real representations were silenced in order to scrub the historical record of universal languaging that exposes those mechanisms of power. Imagining what could have been for texts constructed with the deliberate reproduction of dominant and oppressive modes of thinking in consideration will only engender imaginations of marginalized identities that are half starved. Wong’s text is an example of not only what was, despite censorship, but also why it is important for marginalized peoples to notice the exigency with which others have historically cinematically represented their own marginalization within a given historical context.

When speaking to the Oakland Tribune about her upcoming project, Wong made it very apparent that her attempt to cinematically “introduce to the world… the customs and manners of China,” was not grounded in an explicitly traditionalist manner. Having “never seen any Chinese movies… I first wrote the love story. Then I decided that people who are interested in my people and my country would like to see some of the customs and manners of China.” However, the same newspaper article opened with,

Los Angeles may be the center of the motion picture world, but Oakland has the honor of producing the first Chinese film drama, acted entirely by Chinese, produced by Chinese with with [sic] Chinese scenery, and Chinese costumes designed by Chinese, and with a love tale running through it written by a Chinese girl. (Oakland Tribune)

Apparently, diversity has always generated capital (if only social capital) for the people ensuring it never exists within the structures of power. The long and complex history of racism, especially against Chinese immigrants, in California is thus crucial to understanding the historical context of the Oakland Tribune using the word Chinese seven times: 

Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and “annex,” so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created. 

Naturally, the revisionists always want to talk about it as a matter of white workers not sharing equally enough — as though when a robber enters your home and takes everything you’ve earned… this thief should “share” your property better!

We can grasp this very concretely actually investigating the political rising of European labor in that period in relation to the nationally oppressed. Even today few comrades know how completely the establishment of the Empire in the Pacific Northwest depended upon Chinese labor… the Chinese predate the Amerikan settler presence on the West Coast by many years. (Sakai 77)

J. Sakai continues to offer plenty of evidence demonstrating “virtually every aspect of their new Amerikan economy in this region,” was utterly dependent upon Chinese labor, including Los Angeles’ founding in 1781. Why in the world is this newspaper then characterizing the reflection of Chinese existence in American cinema as some fantastical idea? Because it is not so bizarre to find Chinese people behind the camera, so much so as to see their nonlaboring representation on screen. The consutrction of a modern America (a “melting pot” of identities and ideas or whatever) is utterly dependent on the always invisible labor of margnalized races (the paradigm being the slave plantation upon which traditional America was built), which is why Wong’s clear reflection (as a supposed foreigner) of her personal experience of this erasure’s ensconcement in American culture as ubiquitously the hypervisibility of racism and racial prejudice.

Goddesses Among Us

Unforunately, due to the limited survival of Wong’s text, its narrative cannot be analysed as thoroughly as its context. The historical context of The Curse is rather multifaceted in scope and range, not only reflecting in its inception the writer-director’s personal third-generation Chinese-American perception of American modernism in relation to Chinese traditionalism- the American construction of race as a general organizing economic (material) principle; the effects of one’s labor being erased- but also representing in its narrative the dichotomous expectations for gendered labor in cultural contexts across the Pacific. The exact plot is obscured by the missing intertitles, but the apparent trouble with the in-laws narrative provides a fertile ground for Wong to plant the traditional and modern dichotomy. Lisa Kumaradajaja, Wong’s granddaughter, explains how the titular curse is brought about by 

this mix of Chinese and American culture, if not in the action, but in the costumes themselves. The actors wore the best formal wear from the West, men in suits and women in dresses, as well as Chinese opera costume. The story seems to reflect the ‘East meets West’ conflicts that arise from the integration of values and culture in a Chinese-American family. (Kumaradajaja 12) 

Whereas Wong’s third-generation middle-class status was rather apparent in her narrative focus on cosmetic labor divisions, Yonggang attempted to reach beyond his personal purview to reflect the specifically Chinese/Shanghainese struggle of an undervalued socioeconomic class and labor division to which he does not belong: sex work and maternal labor.

Beginning again with the issue of censorship, it is apparent that the global commercial and critical success of The Goddess was predicated on Yonggang’s obfuscation of prostitution as merely the result of individual actors and interests, not a broader mechanism of power levied by those actors and more as a collective class. Yonggang does not fully represent the population of the subjugated class which he claims to represent because doing so would narratively require more than a single mob boss, and he knows this. He claims his “indignation” at the Shanghai sex workers, “forced to sell their own flesh to live,” (Harris 130) inspired his first film, but the average viewer- whether 1934 Shanghai or 2024 Oakland- would likely not realize this.

The titular character at once embodies Meng Mu (the mother of Mencius, a prominent Confucian philosopher), “who worked night and day to provide for her son’s education,” and a global cinematic symbol for mothers (Harris 129). Harris notes how the redemption of the fallen woman, of prositution, is only fulfilled by her “self-effacing devotion” to motherhood: “[the final expository intertitle…]: ‘The lonely, quiet prison cell is the only rest she has had in this life. In her hopes and dreams, she imagines with great yearning a bright and glorious future for her child.’” While Chinese critics responded to the relatively “conversative” denouement by insisting that indicting a ‘broader social problem’ such as prostitution requires inquest into social vectors of power, not individuals, Americans focused on the formal patriarchal construction of the female protagonist: 

[her] only fulfillment comes vicariously, through her son and his education... virtual absence of the eroticism, romance, feminism or self-fulfilment so common in American ‘fallen woman’ films… ‘even though she is a mother, the prostitute’s access to her own feminine sexuality is continually obstructed, policed, and punished by society’s patriarchal codes of female chastity.’ (Harris 130)

What is apparent in both films and the disparity of critical responses to The Goddess is that disparate cultural and temporal ideals of conservatism not only act as disparate guiding principles for censorship but also viewership and reception; the vernacular modernism of film production is self-reflextictive in its cultural reception and criticism. While one may be inclined then to take at face value Yonggang’s claim that censorship prevented a rawer view of society’s underbelly, those left-wing Chinese critics who publicly charged him with pussyfooting are the vernacular modernist equivalent of Marion Wong. While Wong was not necessarily representing an oppressed underbelly of society which Hollywood was striving to censor, it was the rather affluent representation of California’s historical labor force that was simultaneously reflected in Wong and her upper middle-class family that prevented her film from being profitable within the exigence of a “classical Hollywood.” The fact that this was her only film proves in itself her refusal to self-censor her representation of personal experiences, and it has been paid off manifold in her grandchildren’s concurrent post-production, distribution, exhibition, and deconstruction of her work. Although Wong’s cinematic reflection of the vernacular modernist Chinese-American woman is not as melodramatic in portraying gendered labor as Yonggang’s film, the critique of The Goddess by dissatisfied Chinese viewers who bemoaned the absence of a conclusive critique of social coflict reflects the same vernacular modernism as Wong’s film in which Chinese visibility is at odds with the Western modernist imperative to obscure power.

Works Cited

Harris, Kristine. “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai.” Chinese Films in Focus II, edited by Chris Berry, British Film Institute, 2008, pp. 128-136.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism.” Film Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1, Oct. 2000, pp. 10–22, https://doi.org/10.2307/1213797.

Kumaradjaja, Lisa, and Chris Kumaradjaja. “Marion Evelyn Hong before and after the Curse of the Quon Gwon (1916).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 12 Feb. 2024, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2023.2292462. 

“Persephonemagazine.com.” Persephonemagazine.com, 2024, persephonemagazine.com/2011/06/badass-ladies-of-history-marion-wong/.