Queer Latent Images, Post-Loyalism, and the Cold War: The Case of an Early Sinophone Star, Bai Yun

Abstract

Queer Latent Images, Post-Loyalism, and the Cold War:The Case of an Early Sinophone Star, Bai Yun Wai-Siam Hee (bio) Bai Yun (1916–1982) was one of the most popular male stars in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, going on to win broader fame across the Sinophone world in the 1940s and 1950s. Suffering from cancer, he committed suicide in 1982 in Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan. In his later years, he reflected that he was "In life a drifter; in death a wandering ghost" (Zhang, 7). After his suicide, there was nobody to claim the body. To this day there are no published scholarly essays on Bai Yun: he has attracted mention in the chapters of only a handful of monographs. Mainland Chinese scholars see him as an "idol-like actor" but wrongly believe that he came from Mainland China (Yan, 178). Actually, Bai Yun was born in Malaya and grew up in Singapore.1 I define Bai Yun as a Sinophone star, not only because of Bai Yun's background growing up in the Sinophone community in Singapore and Malaya but also because of his multilingual identity and ability to speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Chaozhouese, Shanghainese, English, Japanese, and Malay (Li Hanxiang 1983, 414). This allowed him to flit between Mandarin, Cantonese, and Amoy language films and to build a career traveling between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He was also one of the tiny number of Sinophone stars in the Cold War era who were able to connect Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The fact that the folk tale adaptations he mainly starred in were free from sensitive political topics allowed him to circulate freely, piecing together the fragmented Chineseness of these four areas. In love films, Bai Yun was skilled at playing the "dashing young man" and won the title "Rudolph Valentino of the East" in the Shanghai [End Page 94] film world (Anon. 1939a).2 This, combined with the Chinese media making much of his overseas birth and part-German ancestry, made him a symbol of Western modernity in the imaginations of Chinese people during the Second Sino-Japanese War.3 On the other hand, cinemagoers in the Philippines voted Bai Yun "China's most handsome male star" (Anon. 1940a, 1): before and during the Cold War, Bai Yun had become a symbol of Chineseness in the imaginations of the Chinese diaspora. Shih Shu-mei (2007, 4) emphasizes that the Sinophone refers to "a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness." Bai Yun was regarded as a symbol of Chineseness by his overseas fans, but inspired polarized reactions in Mainland China itself. Even as he enjoyed the affection of countless adoring fans, he was also disparaged and insulted by his detractors (detailed later). Therefore, Bai Yun's Sinophone experiences were external to China, while simultaneously forming a network of cultural production located on the margins of China and Chineseness. His complex Sinophone experience both includes and externalizes China. David Wang's definition of the Sinophone, which includes Chinese overseas, Han Chinese, and Chineseness, is also suited to the case of Bai Yun. David Wang opposes the way in which Shih Shu-mei casts China—from the Qing to the Republic and on to the People's Republic—as an extension of imperial colonialism in its broad sense. He proposes what he calls a "post-loyalist discourse" to rethink Shih Shu-mei's overreliance on postcolonial discourse and the consequent exclusion of Han Chinese and Chineseness from the definition of the Sinophone. He observes that to a very great extent, to this day Malaysian Chinese people still willingly practice Chineseness and Chinese culture: "No matter whether in relation to the UK colonial government of the past, the current Malaysian authorities, or the Communist Mainland Chinese authorities, it is very hard to say that these Malaysian Chinese authors are being driven to create their Chinese-language discourses and works by post-colonialism" (Wang David 2015, 6). He therefore observes that "post-loyalism" is found throughout the Sinophone world, becoming the most important motive force for Chinese overseas in their rejection or embrace of...