Mainland archetypes in local movies

words yvonne teh

“Learn better Cantonese first,” a native Hong Konger tells a Mainland Chinese wanting to do business in Hong Kong in Herman Yau’s Whispers and Moans (2007). It is a line found in more than one Hong Kong movie with Mainland Chinese characters, and often tends to be hurled out as an insult rather than offered as a piece of helpful advice.

And it confirms two things: Cantonese serves as an identity marker for Hong Kongers and, even some 10 years after the return of HK into Chinese hands, Hong Kongers often seek to distinguish themselves from Mainland Chinese. Indeed, based on the evidence from a range of Hong Kong films, one might suggest Mainlanders have represented the less savoury aspects of society and have been the group of people Hong Kongers try not to be as a matter of course.

Back in 1984, the year the governments of the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China formalized Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, filmmaker Johnnie Mak came out with the first entry in the influential Long Arm of the Law saga. Often cited as a forerunner of the ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ offerings by the likes of John Woo and Ringo Lam that played a big part in earning Hong Kong cinema its international reputation, this gritty crime drama is also famed for introducing the subsequently much-used conceit of a group of Mainland Chinese men coming over to Hong Kong for criminal gain.

For example, 30 years after Long Arm of the Law’s release, Mainland Chinese thespian Wang Zhiwen appeared in Love Battlefield as the leader of a Mandarin-speaking gang of drug smugglers while singer-actor Richie Ren – a native Mandarin speaker, though he hails from Taiwan in real life – had a similar role as the tricky head of a gang of Mainland thieves in Breaking News.

For variety, sometimes just a solitary individual comes to Hong Kong to conduct illegal acts: in Derek Yee’s One Nite in Mongkok, American-Chinese hunk Daniel Wu – an actor known for a time for his less than fluent Cantonese – played an impoverished Mainland villager brought over as a hit man by Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking middleman Tianjin-born Lam Suet.

During his brief visit to Hong Kong, the hired killer meets a female compatriot from the Mainland. Hong Kong-born Cecilia Cheung was dubbed for her Mandarin-speaking role as an enterprising prostitute who takes on the role of her fellow Mainlander’s personal Mongkok tour guide.

And speaking about prostitutes, in Hong Kong movies Mainland Chinese women seem to land call-girl roles about as often as Mainland men are portrayed as gun-toting criminals. A few years before this year’s Whispers and Moans featured a sub-thread about local sex workers facing increasingly stiff competition from ‘more professional’ or cheaper Mainland prostitutes, Made in Hong Kong auteur Fruit Chan followed his critically acclaimed Handover trilogy with three prostitute dramas: was it inevitable that two – Durian Durian (2000) which starred the luminescent Qin Hailu, and Hollywood, Hong Kong (2002) with the bewitching Zhou Xun – would have Mainland Chinese prostitutes at their hearts?

Looking further back into the past: even though these days Carina Lau is often considered a local entertainment figure, her portrayal of a Mainland Chinese ugly duckling who turns into a swan in Gigolo and Whore back in 1991 drew on some of her personal experiences after moving with her family to Hong Kong from Suzhou. Saying that is not so much alluding to her character’s declaration soon after getting to Hong Kong that “I am going to be the King of Whores” (as per the English subtitles!) as being a Mainland Chinese gal who eventually made good in the Fragrant Harbour, albeit only after initial local ridicule because of her different dressing style, demeanour, and accented Cantonese.

Carina Lau also paid her dues early in her film career by spending some time as the Mainland Chinese girl who got slapped in movies – notably in Jackie Chan’s Project A II (1987; one of 10 films selected for inclusion in the 1997, Before and After: Commemorating Ten Years of Reunification programme screening at the HK Film Archive) – and, for cheap laughs, had cockroaches thrown all over her (in her debut Naughty Boys (1986)). Still, it was fellow Mainlander Nina Li Chi – best known these days as Mrs Jet Li – who appears most infamous for bad treatment in Hong Kong movies. As an example, Tiger On the Beat (1988) has in all probability come to be best known for this busty beauty being slapped in the face and then thrown to the floor through a glass table by the Lamma Island-born Chow Yun-Fat.

On the other side of the border, Intruder (1997), released in local theatres only a few months after the Handover, has a Mainland Chinese woman meting out untold horror on a Hong Kong man to get him to cough out personal details that will help her husband to successfully assume his identity. Taiwanese actress Wu Chien Lien (Ng Sin Lin) is the intruder in the title and is many Hong Konger’s nightmare: one of those scary criminals from the other side of the border who will stop at nothing, including torture and murder of young and old, and selling their own bodies, to better both their lot and that of those they love.

Lest it seem though that the only Mainland Chinese characters in Hong Kong films are criminals of some kind or the other, it’s worth recalling that one of the biggest local movie hits in the early 1990s was Her Fatal Ways: a comedy in which Hong Kong actress Carol ‘Do Do’ Cheng played a laughably uptight, iconoclastic and initially humourless Mainland Chinese police officer forced to interact with and learn from the locals (including a few ardent Chinese Nationalist geriatrics) while on official business in Hong Kong.

Police Story III: Supercop (1992) is another commercially successful work that features a Mainland Chinese policewoman working with Hong Kong authorities. Malaysian Michelle Yeoh’s Director Yang is capable, feisty and fond of giving as good as she gets in verbal exchanges with Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong cop. Their final discussion in the English dubbed version of the movie – released in America a year before the Handover – about who should keep a recovered fortune was notable for the Hong Konger’s observation “After 1997, we’ll be working together anyway!”