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Portrait of an era in Hong Kong cinema |
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In addition to paying tribute to Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung, the 2004 Hong Kong International Film Festival (H.K.I.F.F.) also honored Linda Lin Dai, a screen legend from an earlier generation. To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of her death by suicide (1964) and the seventieth anniversary of her birth (1934), the festival featured a retrospective of five of her starring vehicles: DIAU CHARN (DIAO CHAN, 1958), LES BELLES (1961), LOVE PARADE (1963), BEYOND THE GREAT WALL (1964), and THE LOTUS LAMP (1965, released posthumously). Not only do these five films show the range of Linda Lin Dai’s abilities as an actress and charisma as a screen presence, but they also paint a portrait of an era in Hong Kong cinema. At a time when Mandarin language pictures and the Shaw Brothers'“screen beauties” dominated the Hong Kong box-office as well as making an impact on screens throughout Asia, Linda Lin Dai emerged, in her tragically short career, as an exemplar of that time in the 1960s when Hong Kong cinema began to reconstruct a Chinese past and reinvent a Chinese present “beyond the Great Wall” that had become the “bamboo curtain” after Mao’s victory in 1949.
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postwar era |
The postwar era in Hong Kong cinema experienced tremendous growth, but also titanic schisms between “left wing” studios sympathetic to the Communists (often tracing their connections back to the anti-Japanese campaigns of the 1930s and progressive movements reflecting the divisions within the Nationalist Party after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925) and those favoring Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT of the Republic of China on Taiwan (fueled by refugees from both the war with Japan and the recent civil war in China), Further, the industry was deeply divided linguistically by studios specializing in Mandarin language films that could circulate throughout the Chinese speaking world using the dialect that was the “official” spoken form of Chinese in the capitals of Beijing and Taipei and those studios producing films in the local Hong Kong vernacular Cantonese. To complicate matters, language and politics did not line up, creating a range of permutations along both axes. On both sides of the political and linguistic fences, the entire industry was transformed by immigrants-political refugees not only from China, but Chinese displaced by political changes occasioned by the end of colonialism all over Southeast Asia. Chinese, like the Shaw Brothers, came from what had been Malaya and other parts of Southeast Asia (the Nanyang) as the rise of nationalism in countries like Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam made it more difficult for filmmakers of Chinese descent to make a living.
As a British Crown Colony, Hong Kong did censor its films, but still allowed for the development of a commercial industry that could accommodate a range of political positions in an area of the world that was experiencing an economic boom of sorts fueled by American interests (both economic-e.g., cheap labor, competitively priced export commodities and political e.g., fighting the Cold War in hot spots like Korea and Vietnam). Like Hollywood, which built its “dream factories” out of a community of displaced people (mainly Eastern European Jews fleeing anti-Semitism), Hong Kong’s commercial film fantasies were constructed by and for the diasporic Chinese coming from the studios of Shanghai, the film industries of Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.
Like so many in her audience and in the industry in which she worked, Linda Lin Dai, daughter of a prominent politician from Guilin, was a displaced person. Leaving China in 1948 as the Communists began to sweep through the nation, her family settled in Hong Kong. Educated and privileged (like many of the wealthy Chinese who brought considerable accumulated capital with them), Linda Lin Dai divided her time between acting in Mandarin language films for major Hong Kong studios and studying at Columbia University in New York. In New York City, she met her future husband, Long Shenxun, the son of a former provincial governor/”warlord,” another displaced person unwelcome in the People’s Republic. Even before the Cold War, these American connections created a firm ideological, economic, and socio-cultural bond among Chinese of a certain class and political disposition. For example, in 2003, American-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Meiling) died in New York City (not Beijing, Taipei, or Hong Kong). Thus, the fact that Linda Lin Dai, even after her film career was firmly established in Hong Kong, should spend time in New York and meet her future husband there is not so surprising. In fact, it lent her a cosmopolitan flair that added to her screen aura.
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