What a Desirable Woman Is Like: Hsia Moon and the Cultural Agenda of Leftist Film Companies in Hong Kong, 1951–1966

Abstract

Hsia Moon (Xia Meng) was a famous leftist film star in postwar Hong Kong, whose social persona was tailored for specific cultural purposes under the prevailing star system. Her early cinematic roles generally portrayed exemplars of women’s empowerment, as derived from the programmatic ideas of the New Culture Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. But from 1958 onward, Hsia Moon’s characters began to transform in a more traditional and family-oriented direction. In her film Garden of Repose (1964), for example, the female protagonist voluntarily retreats into the family space, offering a quite different answer to the question of women’s liberation. While this story, one among many, threatened to undermine Chinese women’s painstaking struggle for individual freedom that had been in train for many decades, Hsia Moon’s well-maintained social persona justified the harmonious landscape of family life and conjugal relations, redefining women’s family-oriented position as a kind of “Chineseness.” This Chineseness was not limited to the artistic level. Rather, it was a sociocultural representation of leftist filmmakers’ nostalgic memory of their distant homeland, that is, Mainland China itself. And at another level, Chineseness also embodied the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to maintain cultural ties with British-controlled Hong Kong through the political metaphor of a “big family,” which in China’s prescribed hierarchical order alluded to the state. In this sense, Hsia Moon and her characters provided an alternative option to women’s empowerment within the master narrative of the nation-state and the cinematic star system helped shape that narrative.