Love and sexuality are physiological phenomena that despite their apparent transperancy, are actually highly temporal and cultural specific. It is often taken for granted that human emotions and aesthetic responses are universal and universally translatable across times and cultures. The display of a sub-Saharan African child crying or the image of smiling Burmese elder might seem to be naturally comprehensible. What we intuitively grasp as the reasons for and meanings of these emotions are, in fact, culturally conditioned. The sub-Saharan child may not be crying because he is hungry, as decades of televised, American broadcasts have insisted, nor is the Burmese elder smiling because he lives an idyllic, oriental existence. We interpret emotions and feelings hastily and instinctively, but when confronting those of other cultures, it is important to take a step back to remember that the expressive rising and falling of emotions are themselves languages, culturally-specific codes that function differently in various contexts and are as susceptible to misinterpretation as any foreign gesture or word. Furthermore, those same culturally-specific codes are as subject to the evolutions of time as simple vocabulary. The influences of authority, history, cultural exchange, education, media, and the markets all impinge upon the changing manifestations of how people fall in love and how they express it.
In Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mi mi)(1996), Peter Ho-Sun Chan reveals the susceptability of romantic sentiments to the recurrent pulsations of a global market. Li Xiaojun and Li Qiao embark on financial and sentimental quests in Hong Kong to find money and to nurture love. In these complicated processes of chasing down both goals, Chan demonstrates just how much love is affected and conditioned by capitalist consumption. The power and pervasiveness of the global market succeeds in producing a number of different ways of being Chinese and of being in love as such.
Questions to consider:
(1) What is the relationship of money to romance in the film?
(2) How does the continual presence of Teresa Teng's song "Tian mi mi" function in the film?
(3) How has consumption in Hong Kong affected the love of the main characters in the film?
Links:
*Censoring Dating Shows in the PRC (2010)
Secondary references:
*Chow, Rey. "By Way of Mass Commodities." Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 105-120.
