A Country Bumpkin in Cosmopolitan Shanghai

Abstract

This article explores how stage and film productions of Pygmalion in contemporary China present the image of a country rising to affluence and international importance. Chinese adaptations of Pygmalion keep featuring Elizas who are country bumpkins moving to the huge metropolitan centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Their training by the Western-educated Chinese Higgins is an analogy of how China adapts to intense cross-cultural encounters as it enters the global arena. As we shall see, gender reversals in two of the four Chinese adaptations of Pygmalion highlight how China is moving from the shadows of imperialism and the foregrounding of the West to a more egalitarian recognition of the complex interchanges between Chinese and Western cultures.My focus will be on John Woo's 2009 film adaptation of Pygmalion, My Fair Gentleman (Yao Tiao Shen Shi),2 and on its portrayal of the newly affluent Chinese entrepreneurial peasants. This is an important concern in China, where numerous entrepreneurial peasants moved from the impoverished countryside to the metropolis and became actively engaged in economic, social, and cultural exchanges. Likewise in Woo's film, the entrepreneurial peasant Charles Zeng Tian-gao, the Eliza Doolittle figure, moves to metropolitan Shanghai and amassed his wealth. His transformation by Candice Wu Jia-qian, the Higgins figure, from country bumpkin to gentleman, is an analogy for how the country quickly emerged from the devastating poverty caused by the Cultural Revolution to the affluence resulting from China's modernization. Above all, My Fair Gentleman shows how intricately Shaw wove his theory of the Life Force and Creative Evolution into Pygmalion.Pygmalion is the Shaw play most frequently adapted by the Chinese, and with each adaptation the roles of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins acquire new meanings that reflect the country's current social and political situation. In each there is a movement from countryside to large cosmopolitan city. In the 1988 film Gongzi Duoqing (The Greatest Lover),3 Locomotive Fat (Eliza), played by Chow Yun-Fat (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Killer fame),4 is an illegal immigrant sneaking away from his village in Southern China to Hong Kong. The role kept evolving as China increasingly took center stage in the international arena, with the Chinese Elizas becoming richer and more socially powerful. The 1997 Hong Kong stage production of Pygmalion featured a flower girl dressed in country garb speaking the Toishan country dialect,5 in contrast to a Higgins dressed in Western clothing speaking perfect Cantonese and English. The 2003 film, co-produced by Hong Kong and mainland China, Pao Zhi Nu Peng You (My Dream Girl),6 featured Zhang Nin, a country girl newly reunited with her rich industrialist father living in Shanghai. As I have covered previous adaptations in my Bernard Shaw and China: Cross Cultural Encounters,7 I will focus here on the latest adaptation of Pygmalion in China, Yao Tiao Shen Shi (My Fair Gentleman), produced by John Woo, Terrance Chang, and Michelle Yeoh, and show how this 2009 version is much more significant than previous Chinese ones. We will see that Shaw's play, set in London in 1912, is so versatile as to be easily adapted to any time and place in China.The Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Gentleman is the rich Charles Zeng Tian-gao, an entrepreneurial peasant developing his farming business in Shanghai. Such a protagonist reflects the success of the city's marketing economy and its rapid developing consumerism. My Fair Gentleman is dominated by the city of Shanghai; in fact its working title was Dirt Rich in Shanghai. The first shot of the film is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, a futuristic landmark emblematic of the city's history. According to the Shanghai government website, the population of Shanghai in 2009 was 19,213,200 and according to the China Daily may have topped 23 million in more recent years.8 The city continues to play an important role in the economic and social development of the country. Although only 0.06 percent the size of China, it accounts for 1 percent of the country's population, one eighth of the nation's financial income, one-eleventh of the flow of goods, and 25 percent of the import and export of commercial products.The entrepreneurial peasant in My Fair Gentleman, therefore, plays an important role in the development of the Shanghai economy, as the marketing of farm produce is significant. In 2009, its total value was 28.313 billion yuan (about U.S. $4 billion). In particular, the city's emphasis on the development of branded farming industries produces a rapid development of farm products: 370 enterprises with 800 certified farm products. In 2009, the export of farm products totaled 1.291 billion yuan (U.S. $183 million) and these were sold to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Europe. There were also 419 leading farming enterprises, with sales totaling 41.95 billion yuan (almost U.S. $6 billion).9Therefore, My Fair Gentleman is not just a simple story of a country bumpkin's comic blunders in a cosmopolitan city and how he becomes a gentleman by taking image-consulting lessons. The transformation of the protagonist in the film is also emblematic of the rise of the entrepreneurial peasants and their adaptation to a globalized Chinese economy.Without a doubt, the adaptation of Pygmalion into My Fair Gentleman is more significant than previous Chinese adaptations because in highlighting the contribution of the entrepreneurial peasants to keeping the nation's economy thriving, My Fair Gentleman has become part of the myth of nation building.The appearance of My Fair Gentleman was timely. Produced between June 2006 and August 2009, it premiered in Beijing on 21 September 2009 and was released on the 28th throughout China. The film was also featured at the Shanghai Film Festival, the cast and crew attending high-profile press conferences throughout the country to promote it. This was a very bold move because 28 September 2009 was the eve of the sixtieth anniversary, on 1 October, of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. To commemorate the occasion, a long and important film was made in 2009: Jian guo da ye (The Founding of a Republic),10 co-produced by the China Film Group, the China Central Television (cctv) Movie Channel, and the Shanghai Film Studio. The state-owned China Film Group Corporation had a film monopoly prior to China's accession to the World Trade Organization. It is still the only importer of foreign films and is responsible for overseeing and managing all Sino-foreign film co-productions.11 China Central Television is the major state broadcaster in China. Supervised by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (a subsidiary of the State Council of the People's Republic of China), cctv is one of the major official media and is comparable to the People's Daily and the Xinhua news agency. The Founding of a Republic runs 138 minutes and traces the founding of the People's Republic, providing a veritable portrait gallery of modern Chinese political leaders. It allegedly has the largest number of film stars of any other major film and features Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie Yan, and Andy Lau, among others—although some play minor roles, speak only a line or two, or make only silent cameo appearances.Previous Chinese adaptations of Shaw's Pygmalion had appeared at critical times: The Greatest Lover (1988) on the countdown to the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the stage production Pygmalion (1997) right after the handover, and My Dream Girl (2003) as Hong Kong was recovering from the Asian financial crisis. But My Fair Gentleman topped them all: it premiered in Beijing during the height of the celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.My Fair Gentleman, despite powerful competition from The Founding of a Republic, had an extremely successful opening. On the first day of screening in Beijing, it ran second only to The Founding,12 and many cinemas increased the number of showings to satisfy the audience's needs. The film was screened nationwide, deliberately making use of the holiday week to reach the largest audience. The film's budget was 20 million yuan (U.S. $2.83 million) covered by production companies in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Director/screenwriter Gui Yuen Lee had spent four years raising money—until he met one of the producers, Terence Chang. Within a fortnight of the opening, My Fair Gentleman (Yaotiao Shenshi) had earned a respectable 13 million yuan (U.S. $1.84 million).13 Given that the cost of a ticket to a domestic film in China is about 2 to 3 yuan,14 13 million yuan means a potential audience of 4.3 to 6.5 million. In 2011, My Fair Lady was performed in the Festival Theatre at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. As the Festival Theatre contains 869 seats, the Chinese audience attending My Fair Gentleman, within only the first two weeks, could fill almost five thousand to seventy-five hundred Festival Theatres. It was an enormous opening audience, perhaps the largest for any Shaw play in China. The film was so successful that many extra copies were officially made and delivered to cinemas screening the film. This is significant, as China had only about 6,000 screens in 2011, while the United States has about 6,100 cinemas and 37,700 screens.15 In 2009, the overall movie box-office return in China was U.S. $1 billion16 and that of My Fair Gentleman alone was U.S. $1.84 million.17 Thus My Fair Gentleman remains by far the most significant Chinese adaptation of any Shaw play.Why was this particular adaptation so successful? Thanks to the prolific social media reporting on the premier, the response of the Chinese audience to the film was captured very vividly. Although the launch of the film was reported nationwide in various newspapers and their online versions, very few realized the film was a reversal of Alan Jay Lerner's My Fair Lady and none at all mentioned Shaw's Pygmalion, let alone the underlying Greek myth. My Fair Gentleman attracted a huge Chinese audience for three reasons: it had a Hollywood crew, it was a romantic comedy with a stellar cast, and it was a reflection of the rise of the entrepreneurial peasants and the Chinese economy.The promotion of the film relied much on its Hollywood cast and crew. All online media reports and social media discussions focused on the Hollywood crew and stellar cast. Although My Fair Gentleman was a domestic film, “Made in China,” the producers were Hollywood veterans and the Chinese media advertised the film as if it were a Hollywood production, adding with national pride that it had a Chinese Hollywood crew. Shaw's films, or adaptations of his plays, had enjoyed great success in Hollywood: Pygmalion (1938)18 won the Oscar for “Best Writing, Screenplay” in 1939 and My Fair Lady (1964)19 garnered eight Oscars. Yet there have been few recent Hollywood productions of Shaw's plays. It is noteworthy that the three producers of My Fair Gentleman, John Woo, Terence Chang, and Michelle Yeoh, are, respectively, a Hollywood director, producer, and actress. Woo is famous for his Hollywood films, such as Face/Off (1997), starring John Travolta; Mission Impossible: II (2000), starring Tom Cruise; Paycheck (2003), starring Ben Affleck; and of course the very popular films starring Chow Yun-Fat, such as A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989). Terence Chang is Woo's longtime collaborator and the executive producer of Paycheck, Face/Off, and Anna and the King (1999). Michelle Yeoh starred in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and in the James Bond thriller Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). The director and screenwriter of My Fair Gentleman, Gui Yuen Lee, had worked for years with Ang Lee, who won Oscars for Best Director with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain (2005).20As in The Greatest Lover, gender is reversed in My Fair Gentleman with promises of a romantic ending. The plot traces the transformation of a man low in social status into a gentleman and ends with romantic prospects between the student and his trainer. The major interest of the film, however, is the cast. Genders are reversed, with actor Honglei Sun playing Zeng Tian-gao as the Eliza Doolittle figure and actress Kelly Lin playing Candice Wu Jia-qian, Higgins. These two are among the most popular film stars in China. Sun, a graduate of the prestigious Central Academy of Drama, worked with top directors, among them Zhang Yimou, and has won nationwide best-actor awards. Lin, born in Taiwan, graduated with a B.S. in economics and comparative literature from the University of California. Her role in My Fair Gentleman is very close to her real background, as Candice is a marketing consultant educated at an American Ivy League university, and she wears a Harvard jersey at the end of the film. The film's gender reversal took the audience by surprise, for Sun is usually featured in strong masculine roles and Lin plays beautiful leading ladies. But now Charles (Sun) is the student trained by Candice (Lin).Media reports and online discussions reveal that the main attraction of My Fair Gentleman was its being a romantic light comedy, quite a contrast to the solemn official celebrations and the rhetoric of the Chinese National Day. Moreover, watching the play is a very comfortable experience, since much of the pressure is removed because the Eliza Doolittle figure, Charles, has already made his money. He takes lessons from Candice for a very trivial reason: to attract the supermodel and actress Fang Na, who has slighted him publicly. But as Fang Na is played by new actress Xiao-ling Hong, the audience knows that she cannot compete with Candice, played by Kelly Lin. Thus the audience is literally invited to see how the romance works out between Charles and Candice, and the film becomes a relaxing light comedy suitable for the National Day holiday.The media also promoted the film as fashionable and updated in that it showcases luxurious lifestyles and accessories popular in the great cities in China today with the opening of huge flagship stores in Beijing of such luxury brands as Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Dior, and Armani.21My Fair Gentleman had an extensive promotional campaign. The cast and crew traveled everywhere in China to hold high-profile promotional events, which were not merely press interviews but were accentuated by showpieces such as the cast and crew brewing coffee on stage or baking and eating mooncakes. The symbolism is significant because the promotion combined the iconic hot drink of the West, coffee (Starbucks plans to increase its cafés in China to fifteen hundred by 2015), with the iconic pastry of the East, mooncakes, a Chinese baked delight, made with ingredients such as lotus seed paste and salty duck eggs, that can be traced as far back as the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).Like a Shavian sugar-coated pill, there is serious matter behind light comedy. My Fair Gentleman is perfect for the National Day weekend also because the film showcases Chinese national pride. It shows the rise of the entrepreneurial peasants who played a great role in the emergence of China's modern economic success. Their move from countryside to cosmopolitan city is an analogy for China's move from its impoverished state following the Cultural Revolution to its present affluence. My Fair Gentleman, which premiered at the same time as The Founding of a Republic and came second at the box office, was successful because John Woo's film features national pride on an everyday level, while the latter film exhibits national pride on the institutional, historical level. Much of the online media and social media appreciated how My Fair Gentleman provided light romantic comedy needed for a relaxing and entertaining holiday week in the midst of all the solemn national celebrations.In addition to light comedy, however, My Fair Gentleman showcases the social and economic successes of the nation, while The Founding of a Republic captures the country's political ones. The arrival of the entrepreneurial peasants in the city is not accidental. My Fair Gentleman explores two important topical issues: the success of the market economy and the rise of the entrepreneurial peasants. Beginning in 1982, China adopted a policy of “reform and opening”: the reform of the economic system and the opening of the country to foreign trade. It is a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics, moving rapidly from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. China's economy is the second largest in the world (after the United States), with an average gdp growth of 9.31 percent from 1989 to 2010.22 The International Monetary Fund's forecast for China's 2012 economic growth was 8 percent.23Shaw's 1912 play was made topical. In China, a significant change took place among the peasants, as the commune structure was largely dissolved and replaced by the responsibility system, with their economic responsibilities falling under townships and villages. Possibilities of free markets for farm produce, increasing marketing possibilities and rising productivity,24 created many rich entrepreneurial peasants. According to Yasheng Huang, “Tens of millions of peasants began home-grown private businesses, from small-scale manufacturing to service delivery.”25 Huang believes that “China owes its astonishing economic expansion to hundreds of millions of entrepreneurial peasants…. Small-scale rural businesses created China's miracle [and] that nation's recovery from the global recession.”26 According to the latest census, China's population in 2011 was 1.37 billion, with more than 674 million categorized as rural population.27Consequently, My Fair Gentleman presents Eliza and Higgins as two Chinese modern stereotypes evolved from the modern Chinese economy: Charles Zeng Tian-gao (Eliza) is a “土大款” a millionaire entrepreneur first making his money as a peasant, and Candice Wu Jia-qian (Higgins) is a “白骨精” a member of the white-collar hard-working elite. Together they capture the confrontation between the rural and urban populations in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The Eliza Doolittle figure is the entrepreneurial millionaire peasant Charles, who first makes his fortune as a peasant before proceeding to acquire companies in Shanghai. This dichotomy is significant and reflects such Chinese stage stereotypes as the Xiangsheng (相聲), sometimes translated as crosstalk, which is a traditional Chinese comedic performance often in the form of a quick and witty dialogue between two performers, so-called cross talks, featuring the uneducated and comic peasants and an educated city dweller. The coming together of Charles and Candice at the end of the film is symbolic of the new trend in advocating the brotherhood between peasants and city-dwellers, especially bearing in mind the important role of peasants in modern Chinese history.Never had any Chinese Eliza been so fabulously rich as Charles. The 1997 stage production of Pygmalion is closest to Shaw's text, featuring a poor Chinese flower girl, To Lan-heung as Eliza, who is proud to go home in a rickshaw. The 1988 film The Greatest Lover showcases Locomotive Qian Jin Fat as Eliza, a Chinese illegal immigrant swimming across the border to Hong Kong with only the clothes on his back. Zhang Nin in My Dream Girl (2003) is a Mainland Chinese country girl newly reunited with her rich industrialist father Zhang Tin, a Shanghai manufacturer of Buick automobiles.In My Fair Gentleman, the transformation of Charles is the result of marketing and consumerism, both pervasive in cosmopolitan Shanghai, while in earlier films it was presented merely as image consulting. According to a Reuters report by David Randall in 2012, China's premier called “expanding consumer demand” one of his priorities for the upcoming year.28 Consumerism is pushed by branding and marketing. According to a 2009 KPMG study: “Luxury brands are investing large sums of money in heavy marketing to not just promote their brand and products but also to inform Chinese consumers about ‘luxury’ and why they should pay a premium for products offered by luxury brands. Brand building is occurring on a massive scale, not only through print and television advertising, but also through luxury events and shows and customised lifestyle publications.”29My Fair Gentleman highlights the “heavy marketing” occurring in Shanghai. Candice says: “Everything begins with marketing,” and Pygmalion's linguistic strategies are translated into various kinds of marketing strategies. In Shaw's play, speaking a refined English is a skill that can hide one's humble origins; in My Fair Gentleman, it is a marketing strategy. The film opens with the expatriate English teachers: Candice can speak perfect English and her expatriate friends can speak perfect Chinese. Yet Candice hires a Canadian to present his marketing plan in English while she provides the Chinese translation. She assumes that her Chinese clients will value her proposals more if they are presented in English by a Westerner.In actuality, Shanghai develops the branding of farming products and traditional goods are repackaged to facilitate world export. Likewise, in the film, Charles initially wants Candice to market through branding his newly acquired “Magic Dragon Wine,” which is literally a lizard soaked in a bottle of wine. This traditional Chinese rice wine “has a history going back centuries and has been a ‘luxury export’ from China for decades. A green-hued, brandy-like liquor, it is produced by fermenting rice wine in a cask with a generous helping of geckos and ginseng. Drinking the wine is said to help ward off evil and to improve vision.”30 Candice suggests repackaging it to make it a high-end consumer good.Other marketing strategies include bundle sales and advertisements. Once jilted by Fang Na, Charles presents the marketing contract as a bundle that includes himself and the “Magic Dragon Wine” and wants Candice to market them together. Candice turns Charles into a famous brand by a “software upgrade”: she repackages him not only in expensive suits but also by teaching him how to appreciate the fine arts, asking him to take lessons in English conversation, playing golf, and coffee making. She even introduces him to the work of Leonardo da Vinci and to Verdi's opera Rigoletto. Whereas in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle's lessons consist mainly of phonetics and genteel manners, Charles's classes include the gamut of classical Western art and expensive pastimes. Employing the marketing strategy of “news value,” Candice the ex-socialite makes use of the paparazzi by passing Charles off as her new boyfriend, and Charles becomes famous overnight. Fang Na becomes attracted to Charles and Candice fulfills her contractual agreement.However, Charles's education does not end with merely copying the West. The film is aware of the complex cultural exchanges and joint productions between China and the West, and Candice makes Charles memorize background material and art criticism related to da Vinci and Rigoletto. The moment of truth—which parallels the ambassador's garden party in Pygmalion—is Candice taking Charles to a performance of Rigoletto, where he is asked whether the Turandot directed by Zhang Yimou is a Western or Chinese production. This is an important topical reference because Zhang Yimou, the famous film director who directed Puccini's Turandot in Florence and at the Forbidden City, Beijing, was producing his own version of Turandot on 6 and 7 October 2009 at the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing. This is the very stadium that had hosted the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a seminal moment of Chinese national pride, and whose opening and closing ceremonies Zhang had also directed. Neither Candice nor Charles can answer the question as to whether Turandot is Italian opera, as Zhang's Turandot exemplifies the interactive cross-cultural processes taking place in the creation of art: a story about a Chinese princess written by an Italian composer and directed by a Chinese, with Italian soprano Raffaella Angeletti playing a Chinese princess (Turandot) and a Chinese tenor, Dai Yuqiang, playing the foreigner Prince Calaf. The production was conducted by an Italian (Janos Acs) and the orchestra comprised members of China's National Opera House.31 The production came complete with a one-thousand-square-meter lcd scroll displaying an animated movie telling the story.32 (lcd had also played a prominent role in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.) This combination of East and West produced fascinating new cultural fusions. Significantly, both Charles and Candice fall asleep during the conventional stage production of Rigoletto. As with Higgins and Eliza, there are limits to what Candice can teach Charles. Marketing strategies cannot change human nature.The central question remains: Why is Pygmalion such an effective play to showcase a successful Chinese economy? Paradoxically, My Fair Gentleman turns out to be an examination of Shaw's theories of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, a philosophy of will adapted from Schopenhauer. The film begins where Pygmalion ends and rewinds backwards to the beginning, thus foregrounding the moment of transformation of Charles and his attainment of his self-will, and also highlighting the agent behind that transformation, Candice.Although the Higgins figure is Candice Wu Jia-qian, a graduate of an American Ivy League university, she also has nuances of Eliza, who asks Higgins after the ambassador's party: LIZA:[pulling herself together in desperation] What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? Whats to become of me?33 Higgins suggests his mother will find a rich man for her: higgins:[a genial afterthought occurring to him] I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well.LIZA:We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.HIGGINS:[waking up] What do you mean?LIZA:I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish youd left me where you found me.34 In a similar vein, Candice is introduced as an ex-socialite who was about to marry into a rich, prominent family in Hong Kong but was jilted at the last minute. Like Eliza opening her own flower shop, Candice has just opened her own marketing company in Shanghai. Eliza proclaims to Higgins that she will teach phonetics, and indeed Candice is offering her own training classes to Charles, in this instance an Eliza-turned-Higgins.The Eliza in My Fair Gentleman has reversed the social climbing. In Pygmalion, Eliza asks Higgins: LIZA:[crushed by superior strength and weight] Whats to become of me? Whats to become of me?35 But the male Eliza of My Fair Gentleman, Charles, like Zhang Nin in My Dream Girl, does not have this problem. He has already made his fortune and finished climbing the social ladder from peasant to millionaire. His problem in the film is how to repackage his products: the lizard wine company he has just acquired, and himself, in order to pass himself off in high society as a gentleman (for the sake, mind you, of seducing a film star who despises him). The situation is reversed, since it is Candice who wants to climb the social ladder, while Charles has already made his fortune. To Lan-heung, in the 1997 stage play, is considered the illegitimate daughter of a peer newly returned from England. Locomotive Fat, in The Greatest Lover, passes himself off as the Cambridge-educated son of a rich Chinese-American businessman at the Fancy Ball of the Foundation for Indian Retarded Children, and Zhang Nin becomes the genteel daughter at her father's upscale party. But My Fair Gentleman begins with a dinner party for Lung Cancer Awareness. Like some fairy-tale prince, Charles is dressed in all white but is publicly shamed by actress and supermodel Fang Na, which drives him to ask Candice to transform him. After a totally successful transformation, Fang Na mistakes him for an accomplished gentleman. Charles then reveals to her that he is the peasant she once despised: his attainment of self-will coincides with his reconciliation to his peasant origins.In effect, My Fair Gentleman examines Shaw's theories of the Life Force and Creative Evolution. In shifting the adaptation from the image consulting in earlier adaptations of the play to marketing, the focus shifts from appearance to the fundamental human being and the assertion of his inner will. In The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), Shaw regards Siegfried as “the type of healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice and the makeshifts and moral clutches of law and order which accompany them.”36 In My Fair Gentleman, Charles possesses the most free will of all the Chinese Elizas. Shaw's Eliza wills to take lessons from Higgins, and so does the Eliza in the 1997 Chinese stage play, but they still have a concern for social class at the beginning of the play. Previous Chinese Elizas have been passive. Locomotive Fat in The Greatest Lover is forced to take lessons from the image consultant Anita by the rich Hong Kong businessman Big Mouth Sze, who wants to revenge himself on Fiona, the daughter of a shipping magnate who jilts him, by making her fall in love with the poor and ugly Locomotive Fat. In My Dream Girl (2003), Zhang Nin's father wants her to take image-consulting lessons so that she can acquire upper-class taste and manners.But Charles in My Fair Gentleman is like Siegfried. He is fearless, and the catchphrase he uses to laugh at people is “too scared.” It is significant that this catchphrase (als