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The White Snake as the New Woman of Modern China

Liang Luo
University of Kentucky

Introduction

The Nobel committee describes the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature Mo Yan’s
achievements as “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the
contemporary” (Nobelprize.org, 10 December 2012). The same can be said about the
metamorphosis of the White Snake in modern China. Originated from folk storytelling,
this eternally enchanting snake-woman occupied and is still occupying a central position
in the cultural transformations of modern and contemporary China.

This chapter charts the metamorphosis of the White Snake in print, on stage, and on the
screen from the late imperial era to the mid-twentieth-century, and from the Cold War to
the postmodern transformations of the contemporary Sinophone world (Shih et al, 2013).
The metamorphosis of the White Snake had much to do with the modern girl (modeng
xiaojie/moga) discourse and real life new women (xin nüxing/shin josei) throughout the
republican, socialist, and post-socialist eras (Stevens, 2003: 82-103). It demonstrates the
intrinsic connections between identity and performance, between intellectual discourse
and social practice, and among sexuality, revolution, and commercialism.

The Legend of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan) is regarded, together with The Weaver and
the Cowherd (Niulang zhinü), The Butterfly Lovers (Liangzhu), and Lady Mengjiang
(Mengjiangnü), as the four great folk tales of China. The prototype of the folk tale can be
traced back to the seventh century Tang chuanqi tale “Li Huang,” in which a young man
was bewitched by a white snake and as a consequence, his body melted into water and he
died a horrible death. The tale took shape when the structural elements of a young man,
two beautiful maidens, one-night stand in a mansion, bewitchment, metamorphosis, and
the exorcise of the snake spirit were developed in the sixteenth century, making it the
youngest tale among the four great tales (Idema, 2012: 25-46; Tian, 1980: 137).

Most versions of the tale recount how a white snake spirit disguised itself as a beautiful
woman and went to the West Lake in Hangzhou to experience the beauty of the human
realm (renjian). She formed a sexual relationship with a handsome young man Xuan Xian
(Xu Xuan) and experienced human love and happiness. In the meantime, her
transgressive sexuality and violation of the boundary between human and non-human
attracted the attention of Fa Hai, a Buddhist monk with the power to recognize and
exorcise spirits. Feng Menglong’s seventeenth century vernacular tale “Lady White
Forever Imprisoned under Leifeng Pagoda” (“Bai niangzi yongzhen Leifengta”) was one
of the most popular retellings of the tale, highlighting the “lust, caution” parable
embedded in the tale, repudiating the lustful nature of the snake woman and her
destructive power, while upholding the monk Fa Hai as a defender of social norms and

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natural human relations (Feng, 1956; Idema, 2009).

The legend subsequently went through a major transformation during the Qing Dynasty,
when a chuanqi version entitled Leifeng Pagoda (Leifeng ta) and a tanci version entitled
Tale of a Righteous Spirit (Yiyao zhuan) rewrote White Snake as an endearing character
and recast Fa Hai as the destructive power separating lovers and families (Fang, 1995;
Chen et al, 1869). Other versions have since incorporated both the lustful and loving
natures of the White Snake, rendering her the embodiment of the exotic and the erotic in
the legend’s countless renditions in no less than a dozen local dialects and operatic forms
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in China.

The metamorphoses of the White Snake tell a complicated story about gender and class;
sexuality, revolution and commercialism; folk, popular and propaganda culture; romantic
nationalism and transnational cultural and ideological formations in Japan, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Mainland China, and the Chinese Diaspora from the late imperial to
contemporary times. A chapter like this will not do justice to such a vast subject matter.
Instead of closely examining a range of key moments and texts surrounding the subject at
hand (which I reserve for a separate book-length study), I will instead attempt a historical
overview as a first step towards that goal, with a special focus on the transgressive female
sexuality and its global connection as embodied by the image of White Snake and the
actresses and female writers embody her presence in real life. My goal is to use this
preliminary overview to suggest a larger picture, in which the enduring White Snake
theme came to be intricately connected with the reality and representation of the “modern
girl” and the “new woman” throughout the modern and contemporary transformations of
the Sinophone world (Edwards, 2000: 115-147; Sang, 2008: 179-202, and Barlow et al
eds., 2008).

Questions of imagination, technology, and power are important to our understanding of

the White Snake phenomenon in modern China. Imagination concerns how we
collectively produce, project, and promote social feelings and aspirations in modern times.
Can local storytelling express global aspirations? Technology dictates how we best tell a
story, locally and globally, in words and in images, and across multiple media. Finally, the
power relationship among the state, market, and the public reminds us that we need to
actively engage all three in a continued negotiation. These questions should be kept in
mind as we situate the metamorphosis of the White Snake in modern China in the context
of its global connections, multi-media experiments, and structural limitations and
possibilities.

From the Late Imperial Era to the Mid-Twentieth-Century

Ueda Akinari based his now-canonized Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogatari)
on Feng Menglong’s version of the White Snake tale, on which Tanizaki Jun’ichirō again
based his film scenario The Lust of the Serpent (Jasei no in) (Ueda, [1776] 1983; Tanizaki
et al, [1921] 2001: 300-304). Tanizaki’s highlighting the lustfulness of the White Snake

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image had much to do with the cultural milieu of Taishō Japan and Republican China.
There was a “modern girl fever” in both Japan and China at the time. “Modern Girl,” a
short story, with its title printed in bold English letters, appeared in New Literature and
Art (Xin wenyi) in Shanghai in 1929 (Xu, 1929: 406-13). Shorthaired, educated,
aggressive and erotic, the “modern girl” was once a pleasure seeker in Tokyo cafés, who
changed men as if changing her clothes. Five years later, with her working experience as
a café waitress, she made her cross-country travel on her own, hoping to make a living in
Shanghai. Two faces of Japanese “modern girl,” both “adolescent at play” and “working
woman” (Silverberg, 1991: 266), already emerged under the gaze of the writer of this
piece, a Chinese young man back from Japan. The formation of a discourse on the
“modern girl” manifested modern intellectuals’ desperate endeavor of “overcoming
modernity”: to talk about “modern girl” is to talk about modernity and its overarching
power in China and Japan, at the particular world-historical moment of the late 1920s
(Harutoonian, 2000).

The stage and film actresses embodying the fantastic female figures were the most
glamorous “working woman” of the time. Tian Han closely followed the career of Matsui
Sumako in Japan, who played the forest spirit Rautendelein in a Japanese stage adaptation
of Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell) (Hauptmann, 1959), remembered by Tian as
his most memorable encounter with modern Western drama in Tokyo. Sumako, with her
creative rendering of some of the most memorable heroines on Japanese modern stage,
including Rautendelein, Katusha, Carmen, and most importantly, Salome, not only
challenged the still widespread practice of male impersonation, but in putting her
femininity and sexuality on public display made possible a concrete link between the
stage persona of extraordinary female figures, the intellectual discourse on the “modern
girl,” and the real life working “new woman” (Kano, 2001).

After his Tokyo sojourn from 1916 to 1922 and amidst his return visit to Japan in 1926,
Tian Han conceived the idea for Lakeshore Spring Dream (Hubian chunmeng), a film
featuring a modern femme fatale in Shanghai. As in the legendary White Snake story
portraying the love encounter of a young scholar and a snake-woman by the West Lake,
this film is also set by the lakeshore. A young playwright goes to a resort by the West
Lake to recover after a failed love affair. He meets a charming young woman alone in a
“Red Chamber,” a marker of romantic encounter in the Chinese literary tradition (Li,
1993). The woman requests his company and the playwright willingly stays thereafter.
When the woman asks to whip him for her sexual enjoyment, the playwright ultimately
obeys. They enjoy each other’s company in the Red Chamber night after night until one
day a group of robbers shoot and seriously injure him. The story ends with the playwright
waking up in a hospital bed, the whole story turning out to be his “Lakeshore Spring
Dream” (Tian, [1928] 2000, vol. 18: 8-61).

Tian Han claimed that the ultimate charm of avant-gardist endeavors such as “Lakeshore
Spring Dream” originated in its fantastic subject matter—human-snake love—as well as
the fantastic new technology—silent film—it was employing (Tian, [1928] 2000, vol. 18:

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11). Tian’s reinvention of the White Snake tale employed a plot that was rather shocking
and explicit for its time. The dream framework of the film brought to mind the unreliable
narrator Frances in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, whose sanity remains an open
question at the end of the Expressionist classic (Tian, [1928] 2000, vol. 18: 38-41). The
very fact that Tian’s film idea was later produced by the leading Star Film Company
intending to reach a wide audience in Shanghai attested to the intimate connection
between the folk, the avant-garde, and the popular. However, the attempt to merge the
avant-garde with the folk and the popular was not without problems. The actress and real
life “new woman” Yang Naimei (1904-1960), who played the sadist femme fatale in
Tian’s concept for the film, was criticized by Tian for not understanding his design for the
female character (Yamaguchi, 1997: 397-398).

Yang was a leading actress in the era of Chinese silent film, and came to be known for
impersonating “licentious” female characters on the screen. The only daughter of a
wealthy Cantonese merchant, Yang led a privileged life and was a living “modern girl” in
a cosmopolitan Shanghai. Yang admired Marlene Dietrich and the femme fatale images
she brought to life as the leading Hollywood “vamp” of her time, and she carried on the
same uninhabited lifestyle as her contemporary “flappers” in the United States. Moreover,
Yang also emerged as one of the first women to set up her own film company and to star
in her own semi-autobiographical film, appropriately titled Wonder Woman (Qi nüzi), in
Shanghai in 1928. In fact, Yang’s very first screen role, a spoiled daughter of a rich family,
already matched her real life persona and further brought to life the connection between
cinematic representation and social condition of the Shanghai modern girl (Zhang, 2009:
93-96). On the other hand, Tian Han’s complain of Yang’s not understanding his design
for the femme fatale character in the spirit of the Japanese adaptation of the White Snake
tale not only pointed to the gap between avant-gardist design and its popular
representation, it also spoke volumes about the discrepancy between the intellectual
discourse and social practice of the “modern girl” and “new woman.”

If we follow Tian Han’s modernist experimentation in Shanghai, we will encounter White

Snake as femme fatale yet again on the modern drama stage and in real life, in the
actresses who embody the snake-woman’s modern charm. Tian’s Southland Society
(Nanguo she)’s “little theatre” performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome was the case in point.
In the same year when Xu Xiacun published his “Modern Girl” in Shanghai in 1929, Tian
was able to identify his ideal actress to impersonate Salome on Shanghai stage. An
aspiring young actress from the prominent Yu family in Zhejiang, Yu Shan (1908-1968)’s
uncle Yu Dawei was a high-ranking official in the Nationalist Government at the time.
Fluent in English, Yu herself studied at Shanghai Conservatory of Music and later
graduated from Jinling University in Nanjing. She made her name acting as Salome and
Carmen in Tian’s productions in 1929 and 1930 respectively, and was remembered for her
charm and close association with Tian Han, Zhao Taimou, Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, and
Liang Shiqiu, among other prominent male cultural figures of Republican China (Wang,
2009: 45-47). Pictures of Yu Shan performing Salome were published prominently in
Southland Monthly (Nanguo yuekan) in 1929. One shows Yu Shan dancing as Salome in a

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seductive dress, with bare shoulder and feet; her arms stretched out in the shape of a
snake, and her black hair in snake-like curls. The multivalent snake symbolism challenges
Christian iconography with a heroic seductress while also gesturing towards the White
Snake legend so central to Tian Han’s work as a whole.

Tian Han’s lifelong endeavor of “creating the new woman” against the background of the
Hollywood “vamp” tradition further confirms the central importance of the cinematic
mediation to the metamorphosis of the White Snake theme. The spirit of La Bohème
(1926, with Lillian Gish as Mimi) permeated the first half of Tian Han’s “leftist” film
story Lovers in Troubled Times (Fengyun ernü, 1935) (Lee, 1999: 23). The popular
cinematic form became a crucial channel to involve elite and masses alike. Through the
mediation of the screen, folk tales and stage performances were further democratized and
new forms of communicating and disseminating ideas on gender and class were recreated.
Tian Han’s earlier embrace of the Hollywood vamp and his later reaction against its
darkness, as seen in his revamping of the White Snake legend into a Peking Opera
appropriate for propagating feminist and socialist values in his later years, are two sides
of the same coin.

The image of Salome as a femme fatale packaged in glamorously exotic costumes

attracted the attention of the young Tian Han in Taishō Tokyo because of its
sexually-charged and subversive overtones, and also because it recalled the mystical
seductresses abundant in the Chinese folk, literary, and operatic traditions, as snake spirits
and flower fairies (Pu, [1680] 1989). Female sexuality and its transgressive power
preoccupied Tian Han through a half-century-long love affair with the images of the
White Snake and Salome. Metamorphosing from the seventeenth-century Chinese
vernacular tale to the eighteenth-century Japanese retelling, from Japanese modernist
writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s cinematic recreation in the early 1920s to Tian Han’s creative
borrowing in the 1927 silent film Lakeshore Spring Dream, and to the Peking Opera The
White Snake finalized in Beijing in the 1950s, the Salome figure was eventually
reconfigured in the image of the White Snake, a female warrior reinvented under the
condition of war and national regeneration.

Tian Han actively engaged in reforming Chinese opera in Beijing in the 1950s (Tian Han
quanji, 2000, vol. 20: 603-4). Among other things, he finalized his revision of the White
Snake story in the form of a Peking Opera during the first years of the People’s Republic
(Tian, 1953a; 1953b; and 1955). The images of Salome and White Snake as recreated by
Tian Han from foreign and folk traditions in the 1920s and 1950s respectively share such
qualities fitting both the stereotypes of “Oriental mystique” and “Occidental modern.”
Intrinsic to both images were implications of the female as destroyer, the feminine as the
enemy of reason and order, the yin of chaos. The Biblical myth of Eve’s affiliation with
the snake in the Garden of Eden suggests a Western archetype of the snake-woman
charged with transgressive sexuality and demonic energies. Thus there appears to be an
archetypal association of woman with demon-snake in both Judeo-Christian and Chinese
traditions. However much he professed feminist values, Tian Han was undeniably drawn

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to and seduced by this markedly regressive archetype. At the same time, he invested
considerable energies into reclaiming it on behalf of a progressive and socialist vision.
The metamorphosis of the powerful female images from Salome to White Snake and from
Tokyo to Beijing hence should not be read as a simple return to the Chinese tradition.
Both the Salomes of Shanghai, and the White Snakes of Beijing, are distinctively
avant-gardist projects rooted in the early- to mid-twentieth century Chinese experiments
in art and activism.

The reinvention of the White Snake opera in Communist Beijing demonstrates the
relevance of Tian Han’s two lifelong intellectual obsessions with “creating the new
woman” and “going to the people,” originating at the post-WWI moment, and still
asserting key influences in the post-WWII 1950s. Women’s issues, workers’ issues,
nationalism, and international socialism converged, forging a sustained dialogue on these
issues throughout the interwar period and well into the newly established Communist
regime. Throughout Tian Han’s half-century of experiments with the image of the White
Snake, its transformation from a folk demon to a modernist femme fatale, and finally to a
female activist propagating socialism and feminism, attested to the relevance of both the
avant-garde and the popular in the cultural productions from the early years of the
Republic of China to the first decade of the People’s Republic. The Peking Opera White
Snake is thus a key text linking socialist feminism, the image of the female warrior and
the modern femme fatale with Chinese folk and operatic traditions (Luo, forthcoming).

White Snake and the Cold War

The metamorphoses of the White Snake reached a new height during the Cold War. Tian
Han’s Peking Opera White Snake is but a new beginning of a cross-genre and multi-media
flowering of the theme in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China from the
1950s to the 1980s. Throughout the Cold War, supernatural materials such as the story of
the White Snake were creatively manipulated to popularize modern ideas, such as the
celebration of heterosexual love, women’s rights, and the triumph of humanity. The
paradoxical nature of the continuing popularity of the tale throughout Cold War East Asia
urges us to rethink the intricate connection between myth and mythmaking in
contemporary politics and popular culture. The various retellings of the tale largely
worked together to make it into a story of love and reconciliation, and helped to create a
stable master narrative that then will be overturned amidst the changes of the global
1980s.

Five cinematic representations of the White Snake theme from Japan, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and Mainland China frame the transformation of the White Snake during the
Cold War. The theatrical and cinematic performances of the White Snake theme were
represented in the diverse genres of costume drama (Byaku fujin no yoren, starring
Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Shaw Brothers and Toho Company, 1956), animation (Hakuja den,
Tōei Animation, 1958), Huangmei Opera film (Baishe zhuan, Shaw Brothers, starring Lin
Dai, 1962), Kung Fu film/slapstick comedy (Baishe danao tiangong, starring Chia Ling,

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1975), and Peking Opera film (Baishe zhuan, Shanghai Film Studio, starring Li Bingshu,
1980). These performances connect Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China
from the end of World War Two to the end of the Cultural Revolution, and involve
producers, performers, and patrons throughout Sinophone East Asia.

The Hong Kong and Japan co-production from 1956 and the Japanese animation from
1958 can be read together under the rubric of “art of reconciliation.” They attempted to
use beautiful artistry to dissolve conflicts rather than highlighting “main contradictions,”
as was the case in the Peking Opera version finalized by Tian Han in Mainland China
only a few years prior. Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yoren) was Japan’s response
to a booming Hong Kong film industry in the late-1950s, which in turn can be read as a
response to the popularity of Mainland “opera films” from the mid-1950s (Lin, 2009:
74-82). In pursuit of both investors and markets, Japanese filmmakers and producers
looked to Hong Kong as a financial and technical powerhouse for the revival of Japanese
cultural influence in general and its film industry in particular at the crucial moment of
the post-American occupation Japanese cultural remaking. Starring Yamaguchi Yoshiko,
and jointly produced by Toho Company in Tokyo and Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong,
Byaku fujin no yoren came to be remembered as a technically advanced color film, using
the state of the art Eastmancolor for its time and winning the Honorable Mention Award
in color at the Sixth Berlin International Film Festival in 1956 (The Berlinale, 1956).

It is the fantastic White Snake image and the enchanting actresses who impersonated it,
however, that makes these Cold War films fascinating for our purpose of examining the
metamorphosis of the folk tale in tandem with the transformation of the new woman in
modern China. It is also important to situate the White Snake theme at the forefront of
Chinese and Japanese cultural exchanges throughout the long twentieth century. The
controversial Manchuria-born Japanese actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, known for her
impersonating Chinese women under her Chinese name Li Xianglan during the Second
Sino-Japanese War, returned to the role of another “Chinese” woman, this time a snake
spirit, as part of her Japanese/Hong Kong film career revival in the postwar context.

Born into a family of Japanese Sinologists in China in 1920, Yamaguchi Yoshiko adopted
two Chinese names Li Xianglan and Pan Shuhua through her family’s connections with
prominent Chinese families while living and studying in China. Her adopted Chinese
identity, stunningly beautiful appearance, fluency in both Chinese and Japanese, and
professional singing skills made her the most famous “Chinese actress” of the
Manchurian Film Company in the Japan-occupied Manchuria. Accused of being a traitor
to China at the end of World War Two, Yamaguchi was only pardoned and sent back to
Japan when she publicly disclosed her Japanese citizenship (Yamaguchi, 2004).
Yamaguchi/Li was a living example of the glamorous “modern girl” and the working
“new woman” in modern China. Was she Japanese, Chinese, or both? In impersonating
the eternally enchanting White Snake from the Chinese folk tradition in her postwar
comeback in the Japanese film Madame White Snake, wasn’t she further consolidating the
intimate connection between the Chinese and Japanese discourses and practices of the
“modern girl” and the “new woman”?

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It was again the Japanese film industry that continued to explore new media in
representing the White Snake and postwar Japanese desire for reconciliation and cultural
rejuvenation to the wider world. Panda and the Magic Serpent, or White Snake the
Enchantress (Hakuja den) was the first feature-length color animation made in Japan
through the newly-founded Toei Animation Company in Tokyo in 1958. The Japanese
attempts at representing the White Snake as a beautiful enchantress in full color and
feature length animation, and having it widely distributed in the United States and Europe,
in particular, demonstrated the delicate balancing act initiated by the Japanese towards
China, the United States, and Europe at the height of the Cold War. The high-tech
features went hand in hand with the film’s political relevance and its market viability.
Packaged as a film for children and family, Hakuja den combined avant-gardism with
comical appeals. The pedagogical and the commercial came together to usher in a new
era of Japanese animation represented by such figures as the leading contemporary anime
director Miyazaki Hayao, who paid tribute to the White Snake animation as his very first
inspiration (Hu, 2007: 43-61).

The above two Japanese films on the White Snake theme from the late 1950s had the
same collaborator from Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers. Although collaboration between
Japan and Hong Kong fell apart with the animation in 1958, Shaw Brothers did bring
about their own Huangmei Opera film Madame White Snake (Baishe zhuan) in 1962. This
full color feature film starring the glamorous actress Lin Dai (1934-1964) can be read as
Hong Kong’s response to Japan through its connection with the Mainland. About a decade
later, a Kung Fu/slapstick comedy from Taiwan, Snake Woman’s Marriage (Baishe danao
tiangong, also known as Xin Baishe zhuan, again produced by a Hong Kong film
company), further revamped the White Snake theme as a Taiwanese attempt to respond to
the early Japanese and Hong Kong cinematic renditions.

The Hong Kong version from the early 1960s and the Taiwanese version of the mid
1970s could be understood in the context of commercial melodrama, with a strong
tendency to demystify, humanize, and eroticize the image of the White Snake. The Shaw
Brothers, who collaborated with the Toho Company in Japan to produce the 1956 film,
attempted to use the Huangmei Opera film with Lin Dai in the title role to launch a new
commercial venture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like many other film practitioners
at the time, both the director Yue Feng and the leading actress Lin Dai moved from
Mainland China to Hong Kong in 1949 and brought with them either experience of
commercial filmmaking in 1930’s Shanghai or the ability to perform and sing in
Mandarin Chinese.

With the phenomenal success of Mainland Huangmei Opera films such as Heavenly
Match (Tianxian pei), Female Imperial Son-in-law (Nü fuma), and The Weaver and the
Cowherd (Niulang zhinü) in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia since 1955, the Shaw
Brothers launched its own Mandarin-language Huangmei Opera film enterprise in Hong
Kong, which opened with Heavenly Maiden Spreading Flowers (Tiannü sanhua) in 1959
and consolidated its impact in Madame White Snake in 1962, both starring the “Queen of
Asian Cinema” Lin Dai in the title roles. The 18 songs in Madame White Snake, sung by

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Jing Ting and Jiang Hong for the roles of White Snake and Xu Xian, were heavily
influenced by Tianxian pei and other Mainland Huangmei Opera films (Lin, 2009: 79-82).
The popularization of traditional Chinese theatre worked together with the celebration of
the folk tale and the pursuit of sensual enjoyment in modern life, as embodied by the
central line “yao kuaile dao renjian” (“to pursuit happiness you need to go to the human
realm”), the image of the White Snake in the film, as well as the enchanting actress Lin
Dai in real life.

Born in Guangxi province in the Mainland, Lin Dai (screen name of Cheng Yueru) was
the daughter of Cheng Siyuan (1908-2005), a key figure in the political transformations of
both Republican China and the People’s Republic, in his capacity as the secretary of Li
Zongren (Acting president of the Republic of China from 1949 to 1950) and a key
intermediate between Li and Zhou Enlai. Cheng Siyuan returned to the Mainland with Li
Zongren in 1965 and served in various official positions thereafter (Renmin ribao, 5
August 2005: 4). Following her mother from Mainland to Hong Kong in 1949, Lin Dai
emerged in the early 1950s as the leading actress of Mandarin-language cinema in Hong
Kong. With her outstanding performance, she came to be recognized as the only actress in
history who had won the Best Actress Award at the Asian Film Festival for four times.
Lin committed suicide at the height of her career at age 29 in 1964 in Hong Kong,
testimony to the difficulty of real life “new woman” amidst career pressure and love
intrigues as can be seen repeatedly from the suicide of Ruan Lingyu in Shanghai in the
1930s to the suicide of Weng Meiling in Hong Kong in the 1980s (Pan, 2010: 62-64;
Xianggang zhengfu xinwen gongbao, 15 July 2009).

In contract to the real life tragedy of Lin Dai’s suicide in the mid 1960s, the 1975
Taiwanese film Snake Woman’s Marriage (Xin Baishe zhuan) starring Chia Ling, a
martial arts film resembling a slapstick comedy, saw the coming together of the comical
and the erotic and the transformation of the literary into the martial, and magic into
melodrama. Female singing voice functioned as narrative voiceover, developing plot and
releasing emotion. The total humanization of the White Snake brought the comical and
the erotic closer together, where the scholar-turned-martial hero saves the beauty, and in
turn, the beauty rejuvenates the spirit of the hero (yingxiong jiumei, meijiu yingxiong).

Born into a leading opera singer’s family in Taiwan, the star of the film, the actress Chia
Ling (1951- ), had a solid background in both martial arts and Chinese opera, and was
known as a multitalented dan (female role) performer who excelled in both wenxi
(singing) and wuxi (fighting) in canonic opera pieces such as The White Snake before
making her name as a leading film actress in the early 1970s. Chia Ling’s White Snake
consequently combined the literary with the martial. Produced by the Huaxing Film
Company from Hong Kong, the big budget production achieved some of the best special
effects to date in Taiwanese filmmaking, including the lifelike two giant snakes and the
water battle scene between White Snake’s water troupe and Monk Fa Hai’s heavenly
soldiers (Hong Kong Movie Database).

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The cinematic renditions of the White Snake in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the
late 1950s to the late 1970s presented a challenge to the Mainland film industry. During
the first few years of the post-Cultural Revolution cultural rebirth, Shanghai Film Studio
produced the Peking Opera film Legend of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan) as a possible
response to the earlier attempts at recreating White Snake during the Cold War. This 1980
Shanghai version of the White Snake film could be best understood in the context of
multiple dialogues between Tian Han’s Shanghai silent film experimentation in the 1920s
and his Peking Opera White Snake from the 1950s, and among the commercial film
industry of 1930s’ Shanghai, the Mainland opera films from 1950s’ Beijing, and Shaw
Brothers’ Mandarin-language opera films from Hong Kong.

Based on Tian Han’s Peking Opera from the 1950s, and taking inspiration from the
experimental quality of the silent film of the 1920s, and made in the 1980s in Shanghai,
this Peking Opera film made possible a historical dialogue among the 1920s, 50s, and 80s
through the enduring White Snake theme. The femme fatale of Shanghai inspired by the
Japanese renditions of the Chinese folk tale returned to Beijing in the garment of
traditional Chinese theatre, but the transgressive female sexuality and its revolutionary
energy could not be tamed. It joined hands with an international socialism and a state
feminism in the 1950s in Beijing. Such a hybrid image of the “new woman” combined
feminism with socialism, and traditional aesthetics and modern politics. The many
talented actresses who made their names performing White Snake on the Chinese opera
stage from the 1950s onwards attest to the continuing relevance of the theme in the
cultural life and social practice of the new People’s Republic. Conditioned by the
immediate post-Cultural Revolution moment, the 1980 Shanghai version of the White
Snake film quite faithfully followed Tian Han’s mid-1950’s Peking Opera text of the
White Snake story. However, as one of the first feature films from the People’s Republic
in the early 1980s, its high caliber Peking Opera performance, its high-tech special effect,
together with its emphasis on gender and class politics from the bottom up, recreated a
new canon through a much-maligned genre in the post-Cultural Revolution context (Luo,
forthcoming).

Post-Socialist and Post-Modern Revamping

The dramatic political transformations of the late 1980s worldwide both ushered in and
witnessed a new surge in the contemporary transformation of the White Snake theme.
This section examines the metamorphosis of the White Snake amidst the changes of the
post-1980s’ Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the Chinese Diaspora, with the following
three contemporary fictions as key examples: Li Bihua’s novel Green Snake (Qingshe),
Geling Yan’s novella White Snake (Baishe), and Li Rui’s novel The Human Realm:
Legend of the White Snake Retold (Renjian: chongshu Baishe zhuan).

The Hong Kong female writer Li Bihua (Lillian Lee) was and is still at the center of the
postmodern reconfigurations of the White Snake theme. Based on her novel Green Snake,
Tsui Hark’s 1993 film and Tian Qinxin’s 2013 stage adaptation of the same name set out
to radically revamp the White Snake theme by foregrounding Green Snake as the leading

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female protagonist and highlighting the themes of “love, hatred, and lust beyond
redemption” (Tian and Li, 21-24 March 2013; Hong Kong Arts Festival program).
Chinese American female writer Yan Geling’s 1998 novella White Snake continues Li
Bihua’s experimentation on gender ambiguities and role reversals. It also connects
Mainland male writer Li Rui’s retelling of the story in The Human Realm: Legend of the
White Snake Retold in 2007 in their shared formal experimentation of multiple narrative
perspectives and in their sweeping historical visions. The political transformation of the
second half of the twentieth century in the People’s Republic became an important factor
(and even player) in the retelling of the White Snake tale at the turn of the twenty-first
century.

The Green Snake was written by Li Bihua in 1986, and it was revised in 1993. Author of
Rouge, Fight and Love with a Terracotta Warrior, Farewell My Concubine, Temptation of
a Monk, and many other celebrated works, Li remembered the mid-1980s as a time
particularly conductive for creative expression, which made possible her rebellion against
the traditional characterizations of the main characters in the White Snake tale (Li, 1998).
Li’s rewriting focused on the first person female narrator, making her novel an
autobiography of and by the Green Snake. The novel ends with references to the Cultural
Revolution, Hong Kong pop music, the craze over learning English, and other mid-1980’s
fashion, successfully bringing the century-old folk tale to bear the concerns of ordinary
people in the late-twentieth century (Li, 2000).

Li paid respect to the Shanghai female writer Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) and brought
1980s’ Hong Kong back to 1940s’ Shanghai with a direct reference to Zhang’s Red Rose
and White Rose (Hong meigui yu bai meigui). She vividly portrayed the contrasting
images of White Snake and Green Snake for the male protagonist as Zhang did Red Rose
and White Rose. When White Snake was safely domesticated for Xu Xian the husband,
Green Snake was the femme fatale that stimulated his sexual desire, and vice versa (Li,
2000). The central theme of “lust beyond redemption” returned to dominate the White
Snake narrative, echoing Tanizaki’s creative rendition in his 1921 scenario for the silent
film Jasei no in.

Sexuality and revolution remained at the center of Li Bihua’s post-1980 revamping of the
White Snake tale. In Green Snake, White Snake’s son changed his name from “entering
the officialdom” (Shilin) to “Facing the sun” (Xiangyang), destroyed the pagoda with
Green Snake’s help and liberated White Snake. The son’s self-initiated name change
signaled the Hong Kong female writer’s lack of interest in representing the imperial
examination (as conveyed by the name Shilin) and her keen interest in referencing the
Cultural Revolution (as Xiangyang would readily remind the reader). The novel indeed
referred to the Cultural Revolution specifically as “a revolutionary game,” and claimed
that snakes could be free from such political vicissitudes while human beings must face
the undesirable amidst great political changes. With revolutionary zeal dampened and the
ending of the Cultural Revolution, the reader was brought to the 1980s and we overheard
a young man propose to a young woman at the West Lake. The reader then witnessed the

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uneasy juxtaposition of an enchanting romantic encounter at the iconic locale and the
obsession with material goods of the late 1980s—willow tree, bicycle, sewing machine,
fridge, fan, two-speaker stereo, and cassette tapes of Cantopop by Andy Liu and Leon Lai.
The autobiography of the Green Snake thus connected Hangzhou (where the West Lake is
located) to Hong Kong (where Green Snake was sending her story to be published).
Green Snake, the female authorial voice within the story proper requested the editor (to
whom she was contributing her story) to pay her in Hong Kong or US dollars, or at least
the foreign exchange currency from the Mainland. Moreover, her final emphasis on
writing as a way “to cure loneliness” completed the self-representation of the female
writing subject, as Li Bihua, the creator of Green Snake, was at the same time reinventing
her own subjectivity through creative rewriting of the canonic White Snake tale (Li,
2000).

Written by a Chinese American female writer Geying Yan, author of Celestial Bath and
The Flowers of War, and member of both the Hollywood Writer’s Guild and the Chinese
Writer’s Association, the novella White Snake won the October (Shiyue) literary prize in
2001 in Mainland China. Yan Served in the People’s Liberation Army as a teenage dancer
during the Cultural Revolution and her version of the White Snake story was also set
during the Cultural Revolution, about a female fan’s infatuation with the actress/dancer
famous for her role as the White Snake. The novella employed multiple narrative
perspectives: the female fan loved the Sichuan Opera version of the White Snake story.
She was particularly taken by the transgender Green Snake (and subconsciously took up
the role of the Green Snake in real life), and she hated White Snake’s love interest, the
scholar Xu Xian. Through the female fan’s interior monologue we were presented a
daring question: is there life beyond heterosexual love? Shifting narrative perspective to
that of the actress, the reader was introduced to the interior monologue of the “White
Snake” who had no knowledge of the real identity of the young man frequenting her room
of solitary confinement: she was mesmerized by the young man (in reality, the
cross-dressing female fan) at the height of the politics of the Cultural Revolution—“she
felt that he is here to save her, like the Green Snake saved the White Snake; she cannot
live without him, regardless of who he is” (Yan, 2007).

The female authorship and feminist transgression so prominent in the two White
Snake-themed fictions discussed above signaled a significant change in the social realities
and cultural representations surrounding the Chinese new woman in the post-Mao and
postmodern Sinophone world. Unlike previous texts and visual representations created by
men, these female-authored texts made possible the emergence of alternative voices and
interpretations of transgressive female sexuality, especially those not fitting the
heterosexual norms. It is in this context we now turn to The Human Realm: Legend of the
White Snake Retold (Renjian: chongshu Baishe Zhuan).

Written by the Mainland Chinese male writer Li Rui (and co-authored by his wife, the
female writer Jiang Yun), The Human Realm was published by Chongqing publishing
house in 2007. It was part of an international project retelling myth in contemporary times.

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The novel posed the following enduring questions: what does it mean to be human? What
does it mean to be in the human realm? Similar to Li Bihua’s Green Snake, it again
transformed the former supporting role Green Snake into the leading female character,
and pondered a similar question from her perspective: “to be demon or human, for her,
that is not the question; she likes to be neither human nor demon; why being a human if
you cannot be free?” (Li, 2007)

The Human Realm was part of the Canongate Myths Series retelling myth from myriad
cultures in contemporary times. The project was conceived in 1999 by the owner of the
Scottish publisher Canongate Books, and the first three titles in the series were published
on 21 October 2005. The official website of the Myths Series describes this ongoing
endeavor as “the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication ever undertaken,”
as “Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives—they explore
our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means
to be human” (Canongate Books, 2013). Li Rui and Jiang Yun’s attempt at retelling the
White Snake story hence participates in this global chorus of myth-remaking including
authors as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, AS Byatt, David Grossman,
Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor
Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugresic, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson
(Canongate Books, 2013).

The universal message and the transnational production of The Human Realm: Legend of
the White Snake Retold signal a new direction for the reinvention of the White Snake tale
in the contemporary world. Since the early 1990s onwards, the extreme popularity of the
Taiwanese television series A New Legend of the White Snake (Xin Bainianzi chuanqi, 50
episodes, 1992) in the Mainland already paved ways for the twenty-first-century
cinematic and theatrical revivals of the White Snake theme in high-tech symphony-style
Peking Opera performance Madame White Snake: Seasons of Love (Bai niangzi: aiqing
siji, 2009) and special effect-ridden three-dimensional film It’s Love (Baishe chuanshuo,
starring Jet Li as Monk Fa Hai, 2011), all with a keen focus on the enduring theme of love
and the triumph of humanity, with an emphasis on the gray zone between human (ren)
and non-human (yao), and good and evil (Thorpe, 2011: 483-504; Yang, 2012: 96-97)

Influential Taiwanese productions such as Resurrection from the Fire: Legend of the
White Snake (Yuhuo chongsheng: Baishe zhuan) by Lin Huaimin of the Cloud Gate
Dance Group (Yunmen wuji) and the Taiwanese opera Super Version of the Legend of the
White Snake (Chaoxuan Baishe zhuan) by Minghuayuan are energizing new attempts at
recreating White Snake in Taiwan (Yunmen wuji, 2013; Minghuayuan, 2013). The
multi-media performance of Taiwanese Opera by Minghuayuan, for example, often takes
place in huge arenas and resembles an extremely-crowded pop concert, where the
audience must wear rain coats to avoid being completely soaked by water as
high-pressure water hoses will be employed during the water battle scene, when the
whole arena turns into a battle field between White Snake’s water troupe and Monk Fa
Hai’s heavenly soldiers (Chaoxuan Baishe zhuan, 2007).

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The leading Mainland TV channel, Hunan Satellite TV, recently unveiled its new
celebrity-imitation show, Your Face Sounds Familiar (Baibian dakaxiu, 1 July 2012),
which is based on a Spanish reality TV show Tu cara me suena originally aired in
September 2011. Since its airing, the Spanish show has been remade in Chinese, Greek,
Italian, Turkish, and other languages and has become a worldwide popular cultural
phenomenon (Your Face Sounds Familiar, 2013). The Chinese version of the show
continuously features the White Snake theme throughout its weekly serializing during the
first few months of its airing. The program’s celebrity hostess Xie Na (with more than
thirty million followers on Weibo, or the Chinese twitter) had impersonated both White
Snake (in the style of the 1992 Taiwanese TV series starring Angie Chiu) and Green
Snake (imitating Maggie Cheung’s rendering of the Green Snake in Tsui Hark’s 1993 film)
on the program. The extreme popularity of the White Snake tale and its earlier visual
representations boosted the entertainment and commercial values of the new TV show,
which is watched online worldwide at a click of the mouse as Hunan Satellite TV has its
own Youtube channel for oversea viewers, while the continued focus on the celebrity
actress impersonating the images of the White Snake and the Green Snake further attested
to the cultural relevance of the representation and practice of the “new woman” in the
contemporary Sinophone world.

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