Tag: Loretta Yang Hui-shan

This Love of Mine (我的愛, Chang Yi, 1986)

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When an already anxious housewife discovers her husband’s affair, she becomes aware of the extent to which she is already trapped by the patriarchal social codes of the contemporary society in Chang Yi’s psychological melodrama, This Love of Mine (我的愛, wǒ de ài). This very messy situation takes on a meta subtext given that This Love of Mine became the last film Chang Yi and his leading actress Loretta Yang would ever make as the pair were hounded out of the Taiwanese film industry after their affair was exposed by the film’s screenwriter, who also happened to be Chang’s wife, the novelist Hsiao Sa.

Wei-liang (Loretta Yang Hui-shan) is a typical housewife who’s devoted herself entirely to her husband and children, but she’s approached one day by a childhood friend, An Ping (Elten Ting), who tells her that her husband Wei-ye (Wang Hsia-Chun) is having an affair with her sister, An Ling (Cynthia Khan). The news comes as a shock to her and profoundly destabilises her world. When she confronts Wei-ye, he admits everything but makes no real excuses or promises to end the affair. In fact, he does not really do anything but only seems resigned to the situation as if he had no agency over it. 

Wei-liang takes the children to her mother’s and decamps to Kaohsiung to look at apartments but soon realises the impossibility of her situation. She can’t afford the deposit on a flat that she doesn’t like anyway and has no real income nor savings because she poured everything into Wei-liang’s business. Approaching an old friend about a job, she’s told that she’s just too old to re-enter the workforce and will struggle to find anyone who’ll hire her. Even if they do, it won’t be worth her while. The simple fact is that she’s trapped. She’s done everything “right” but has been betrayed and is now left with the realisation that she is powerless. Her husband can do as he pleases because she is economically dependent on him and therefore cannot leave. Wei-liang’s only option is to accept her humiliation and tolerate her husband’s affair.

Her anxieties had begun long before with the early death of her father. Wei-liang resented her mother for remarrying, but she too was faced with this same economic impossibility in the wake of widowhood rather than divorce. Her mother points out that without her stepfather, who does not seem to have treated Wei-liang particularly badly even if he is also a very patriarchal man and expects her mother to wait on him hand and foot, Wei-liang would not have finished her education and what else really could she have done in her situation? It may have been this sense of precarity that most frightened Wei-liang and explains her fixation on the children’s health, panicking about her son eating grapes with the skin on because of the pesticides and insisting on apple juice rather than the sugary drinks and junk food that Wei-ye buys for them. 

Wei-liang taking the children to KFC might be the clearest sign of her despair. Taking a razor blade to her hair, she hacks it all off and gives herself a slightly deranged look while directly attacking her femininity. Thereafter she falls into a depression, increasingly unable to see any kind of solution. Wei-ye says that their problem cannot be solved by divorce, but it’s unclear what kind of solution he favours. The implication is that Wei-liang should pretend to ignore his affair and allow him his desires while continuing to play the role of the perfect housewife. An Ling, meanwhile, has her own degree of intensity in insisting that Wei-liang is trapping her husband in obligation and that she is “cruel” for not letting him go so they can be together. Wei-ye hasn’t even really said whether he wants to leave his wife for An Ling or she’s just a casual thing, though it’s unlikely she wants to raise his children too. 

Nevertheless, when An Ling says the only way Wei-liang can win is if she dies, it opens the door to something darker as An Ling later manipulatively attempts to take her own life in romantic frustration. It becomes obvious that the only “solution” is that one of these women will have die for there are no other ways out of this situation, especially as Wei-ye refuses to make any decisions or play an active part until finally admitting that the status quo is “unfair” to Wei-liang, which just makes it sound as if he has rejected domesticity in favour of the freedom to pursue his desires with An Ling. Wei-liang points out that she had “desires” too, which were largely unmet by Wei-ye, but that she devoted herself to the family as society expected her to do with nothing left for herself, which might also explain her already fragile mental state. While Wei-liang’s daughter plays with a doll’s house in an echo of the Ibsen play, Wei-liang begins to see that her life has been a lie and her family a kind of illusion. There is only really one way out, and Wei-liang must put herself to sleep in one way or another in order to accommodate herself with it.

This Love of Mine screened as part of the BFI’s Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Kuei-Mei, a Woman (我這樣過了一生, Chang Yi, 1985)

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“Why are women always being tolerant?” a middle-aged, unmarried daughter asks her mother uncertain why she stoically put up with everything she did as if she had any other choice. As the title implies, Chang Yi’s Kuei-Mei, a Woman (我這樣過了一生, Wǒ Zhèyàng Guò le Yīshēng) , based on a book by his then wife Hsiao Sa, is the story of one ordinary woman though one who perhaps stands in for that of her nation undergoing a period of rapid change from post-war penury to comfortable prosperity in a little more than 30 years which is in essence a generation. 

Kuei-Mei (Loretta Yang Hui-shan) leaves Mainland China during the chaos of the civil war and escapes to Taiwan with her cousin. Living in limbo, neither of them intended to stay very long and assumed they’d one day be going home. Nevertheless, there are things which must be done, which is why Kuei-Mei finds herself gravitating towards an arranged marriage with a widowed father of three, Hou (Lee Li-chun), another Mainland refugee with a steady job as a waiter in a restaurant run by a foreigner. For lack of other options, Kuei-Mei decides to become Hou’s wife, but unbeknownst to her, he has a serious gambling problem that continually endangers their family and eventually loses him his job. Shackled to an irresponsible man, it’s Kuei-Mei who has to shoulder the responsibility of trying to keep the family together but in the end she can save it only by breaking it apart, accepting a job as a housekeeper to a wealthy couple who are moving to Japan taking with her only two of her five children, one of the twins she bore herself and Hou’s oldest boy who struggles in the Taiwanese educational system. 

As a middle-aged, modern woman, Cheng-fang, Hou’s oldest daughter, asks her step-mother why she chose to forgive her father, returning after having left him on discovering that he had fathered a child with another woman. Kuei-Mei doesn’t have much of an answer for her, we can infer she returned because the children needed her and she couldn’t support them alone, but wonders if her unhappy marriage is the reason Cheng-fang has remained single. Contemporary women have other options, they need not stoically resign themselves to passive suffering as the women of Kuei-Mei’s generation were expected to do. None of the marriages we see are particularly happy, from that of Kuei-Mei’s cousin and her husband whose constant arguing pushes her towards a marriage of her own to escape the awkwardness of being a guest in their home, to the wealthy Weis in Japan who again argue constantly because, the servants gossip, of a patriarchal power imbalance. Mr. Wei is dependent on his wife’s family for influence and advancement, but humiliates her through his infidelity while she feels trapped, fearing the humiliation of middle-aged divorce may be even worse. Again it’s a desire to escape the awkwardness of the Weis, along with the “humiliation” of living as mistreated servant, that motivates Kuei-Mei to leave their employ to work illegally in a restaurant in the hope of earning higher wages in order to return home and open a restaurant of her own. 

Kuei-Mei’s determination is in a sense to be her own boss, though the level of autonomous independence she can achieve is perhaps limited by the patriarchal society in which she lives. Nevertheless, she works hard to achieve it despite being tied to the dead weight that is Hou who can only drift along behind her, waiting tables in the restaurant she eventually sets up which is named after a street in the Shanghai she left as little more than a teenager. As an old woman she receives a letter from the man she was engaged to in her village, a sudden reminder of the life she could have had, all her youthful dreams of romance sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism in her marriage to Hou. But despite all the difficulty she remains surrounded by the family she secured through her maternity, even if the grown-up children all dream of lives abroad, scattered by the glittering prizes of a newly prosperous era. 

Late in life walking with Cheng-fang, Kuei-Mei passes the place where her twins were born, an elegant tower block replacing the tenement where she first lived with her cousin after arriving in Taipei. Her rise mirrors that of her country, patiently working hard to make something of herself in turbulent times, unrecognised by the world around her, but emerging with quiet dignity in her ability to bear her sorrow with grace as she determined to build a better future for her children. Her life has, however, been hard and its costs are visited directly upon her at its end, the ills of the modern society ironically symbolised in a cancer of the womb in a woman whose triumph lies in her maternity. A social realist epic filmed with a studied detachment, Chang’s hugely empathetic biopic of the everywoman has only a profound respect for stoic suffering while quietly resentful of the society which demanded it.

Kuei-Mei, a Woman streams in the UK 18th to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Trailer (English subtitles)