The Chinese Mirror

The First Marquee Name: Wang Hanlun

The actress who Chinese moviegoers knew as Wang Hanlun  王汉伦 was born Peng Jianqing in 1903 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.  Her early life had much in common with that of Songlian, the protagonist of Zhang Yimou's 1991 movie "Raise the Red Lantern", a character played by Gong Li.  The youngest of seven children, Peng Jianqing was by all accounts her father's favorite, and although the family was strict and traditional in keeping with the times, her father sent her to an excellent private institution, St. Mary's School for Women in Shanghai.  However, her father died when she was 16, imperiling the Peng family's financial position.  In keeping with feudal tradition, the eldest brother became clan head, and he and his wife opted for the most common means of disposing of superfluous daughters at that time:  young Jianqing was pulled from school and a marriage was arranged for her, in this case an alliance with a man named Zhang, a coal mine operator in the Northeast China province of Liaoning.  Her depression at this sudden shift in her personal situation grew worse when she discovered her husband was continuing a relationship with a mistress he had before the marriage, but when she confronted him about it he dismissed her objections, saying the "it's not unusual for a man of means to have 3 or 4 wives, so don't trouble yourself about it."  Zhang's company was a joint Sino-Japanese enterprise, and when Peng Jianqing accompanied her husband on a business trip to Shanghai, she learned something more about Mr. Zhang, that his collaboration with the Japanese went beyond the economic sphere to the political:  he was actively assisting the Japanese in their encroachment into Northeast China that in less than a decade would result in full Japanese domination of the region, and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo.  When she accused him of being a traitor, Zhang struck her.  She could take no more and demanded a divorce, to which his reply was "If you leave me, you'll be crying the rest of your life."  But she left him and remained in Shanghai.  Her family's disapproval of her action forced her to make other living arrangements:  she moved in with a distant relative and began to eke out a living, first as a teacher and later as an English language typist.

The "Poet Director": Sun Yu

     Sun Yu was born on March 21, 1900 in Chongqing (Chungking), Sichuan province, to an intellectual family which valued education highly.  Sun's father, who had been a successful scholar at the provincial level during the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, was a historical researcher who traveled around China, and as a boy Sun Yu often went along, which added considerably to the future filmmaker's experience and knowledge.  The family later moved to Shanghai, where Sun Yu saw his first movie in a theater.  In 1914, Sun became a student at the Nankai Middle School in Tianjin, where another student was a young Zhou Enlai, two years older than Sun.  At that time, Zhou was acting in a school play, titled Yiyuan Qian  一元钱 ("One Yuan in Cash"), a progressive play which Zhou had also written.  Sun admired it so much he saw it five times.  One day, as Sun was sitting on campus, he saw Zhou passing by and abruptly stood up.  Zhou, who had been absorbed in reading a manuscript, stopped.  Seeming to understand that Sun wanted to talk to him, Zhou smiled, which prompted Sun to blurt out, "'One Yuan' is really great!  Your acting is really great!"  Zhou Enlai smiled, and sat down to talk with the younger boy for a while.  In 1949, over 30 years later in Beijing, at a gala banquet held by the Chinese Motion Picture Association during the 1st National Cultural Convention, the now Premier Zhou Enlai and Sun Yu met once again.  To the latter's surprise, Zhou not only recalled Sun's school name, he also gave the director an autograph in which he urged Sun to "put motion pictures at the service of the people."

    After graduating from middle school, Sun Yu passed the entrance exams for admission to Qinghua University, where movies and poetry became his twin passions.  In his third year, he entered a film reviewing competition and won the grand prize.  Among the judges in the competition were future Chinese film directors Zhu Shilin and Fei Mu, while the chair of the panel was Luo Mingyou, who as the head of the Lianhua (United Photoplay Service) Film Company would one day rewrite the history of Chinese cinema.  After graduating from Qinghua, Sun Yu took up advanced study at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, where his graduate thesis was "On English Translations of the Poetry of Li Bai." [Li Po]  After Wisconsin, Sun studied screenwriting and directing at Columbia University, while also studying photography at the New York Institute of Photography.  In 1926 he returned to Shanghai to formally begin his film career.

Wang Renmei Documentary

On September 26, the English language service of China Central TV carried a 30-minute documentary on the life and career of the actress Wang Renmei 王人美, a star of China's silent and early sound era.  The narration is in English, with English subtitles for the film excerpts and interviews with Chinese film scholars.  Sina.com, the Chinese news service, has it here:

http://support.sina.com/realty/video/en_news/en_clip03.html

The Emperor: Jin Yan

    The 1930s matinee idol Chinese audiences knew and adored as Jin Yan 金焰 was a Korean, born Kim Duk-lin 金德麟 (pronounced Jin Delin in Mandarin) in Seoul in 1910, one of several children of a doctor.  At that time, Korea was under Japanese rule.  Working under the underground code name "Golden Flame," for which the Chinese characters are 金焰, Dr. Kim was one of the founders and leaders of the Korean national independence movement.  When the authorities ordered Dr.Kim's arrest in 1912 for his activities, the family made its   way north to the Yalu River in winter, then fled into exile in China, eventually settling in Tianjin.  The family thrived in China until the father's death in 1918.  His impoverished widow, unable to support her children on her own, found homes for them with various relatives living in East China.  Little Duk-lin was taken in by an aunt who lived in Shanghai, and later Tianjin.  He grew up healthy and strong, and was a star athlete in school.  In 1927, after graduating from middle school and just 15 years after fleeing Korea, he boarded a steamboat back to Shanghai and found work as an apprentice technician at Xinmin, one of the smaller studios.  But before long his good looks, personality and willingness to work hard moved him out from behind the camera.