The Importance Of Chinese Culture In Street Angel

Many people face the task of learning about a new culture with trepidation. The main concern is often communication. Beyond language barriers, people fear the inability to understand a culture due to fundamental differences between the experiences of members of the culture and themselves, the outside observers. So when I first begin the course Intro to Chinese Cinema, I entered with an acute awareness of my lack of exposure to Chinese culture and thus the fear that I wouldn’t be able to understand the themes and motivations of Chinese films. Contrary to my expectations, as the class progressed I was able to connect to each film and glean knowledge of Chinese culture through the human experiences portrayed on screen. Understanding and learning

In particular, “the film features two Chinese folk songs, Song of the Four Seasons and Songstress of the World, which are considered essential to the film’s success” (87, Historiography and Sinification). These two songs and other aspects of the film become a part of the film’s attempt at Sinification, or making things Chinese as defined in discussion. In this film and many others “filmmakers featured popular Chinese tunes in the narrative as an audio code of national authenticity” and “inserted a local Chinese signature” (87, Historiography and Sinification). The Song of the Seasons is therefore a part of the Chinese story depicted in this film, not only because of its tune, which is reminiscent of traditional music, but its content, a reference to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, as pointed out in discussion. This song is also a story of the suffering of a young widowed woman. Music is a universal language for a reason; the audience is able to immediately connect via emotion to the sad tune, despite its foreignness to outside observers, and sympathize with the subject of the song. Through the transmittance of emotion, which acts as the human story in this case, the Chinese folk song enables the audience to sympathize more about the plight of the women associated with the song: Xiao Hong and the widowed young woman. If these two characters represent women

The historical context of humanity in this film is the recurrence of forbidden love throughout storytelling. Since love is an emotion with the potential to be universally understood by all people, it is a human story. Forbidden love goes one step further to describe love which outside forces try to end, a trope in tragic love stories like Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pyramus and Thisbe. The human story of forbidden love between Chen and Xiao Hong makes up part of the layered human experience, but the Chinese story comes in the form of the forces which prevent this love. During this time period the buying of young girls like Xiao Hong to raise as courtesans was still practiced in Shanghai. As discussed in class, part of the goal of this film was to raise issues about the tragic position Chinese women still found themselves in during the early 20th century. The audience is able to use the human story of forbidden love as a lens to examine the historical context of China surrounding this practice, and thus an understanding of women’s position in Chinese culture in the 1930s. Since forbidden love implies tragedy, and indeed the film does end with the tragedy of the death of Xiao Hong’s sister, this film argues through both the Chinese and human story that a