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Abstract:
In examining the way Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon grapples with cultural identity and Chineseness, this essay considers Lee's construction of an image of "China" in the film, as well as its feminist possibilities. These readings reveal Lee's conflicted critique of traditional Chinese cultural centrism and patriarchal hegemony.
The wu xia pian, or Chinese sword-fighting movie, occupies a special place in the cultural memory of my childhood.1 Growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Singapore, I remember with great fondness escaping from the British-based education system I attended and from the blazing heat of the tropical sun to the air-conditioned coolness of the neighborhood cinema. (This was long before cineplexes became fashionable.) Inevitably, a sword-fighting or kung fu flick from Hong Kong would be screening. The exoticism of one-armed swordsmen, fighting Shaolin monks, and women warriors careening weightlessly across the screen informed my sense and (mis)understanding of Chinese culture, values, and notions of "Chineseness" more radically than any Chinese-language lessons in school could have. The ideological impact of this genre should clearly not be underestimated, as cinematic fantasy is sutured into the cultural and political imaginary of China, particularly for the Chinese in diaspora.2
Like many moviegoers of Chinese ethnicity, I responded to Ang Lee's cinematic epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) with genuine enthusiasm and anticipation. This excitement about the film continues to this day, but my response is also fraught with ambivalence. For many Chinese in the United States and around the world, Lee's film marks an important critical and commercial breakthrough for Asian and Asian American filmmakers who wish to make it in Hollywood. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was showered with critical acclaim, enthusiastically received at major international film festivals, and bagged numerous nominations and awards, including the Academy Award in 2001 for best foreign-language film.3 On the one hand, a kind of cultural nationalism lured Chinese viewers to root for the film to triumph in Hollywood. On the other hand, the film's success evoked suspicions of stereotyping, exoticism, traditionalism, and pandering to a Western gaze, a critique grounded in the methodologies of Edward Said's anti-Orientalism.
Ambivalence often frames the responses Chinese audiences have toward Lee's film. When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made its debut in...