The Cultural Politics of Staging Salomé in China
Guest post: Dr. Liang Luo, University of Kentucky
The Chinese avant-gardist artist Tian Han 田漢 (1898-1968) had rendered Oscar Wilde’s notorious play Salomé (1891) in its first full Chinese translation as a student in Tokyo in November 1920.[1] As the lyricist of the Chinese national anthem, Tian Han is celebrated today as a founding cultural figure in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in 2021, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates its centennial. The image of Tian Han and the figure of Salomé became intricately connected across questions of sexuality, revolution, art, and politics. When Chinese avant-gardist director Tian Qinxin 田沁鑫 (1969-, head of the National Theatre of China as of 2020) premiered her play Kuangbiao (狂飆 Hurricane) in Beijing in 2001, a play reenacting Tian’s love stories through his original and translated plays, the figure of Salomé became a central trope in staging the life story of a founding figure of the PRC. Hurricane had been designated as one of the key plays to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the CCP twenty years ago, and it still exerts important influence on contemporary Chinese popular and political culture. The play traveled from its 2001 Beijing premiere to its 2017 Shanghai restaging, and from touring Japan in 2018 to its contemporary afterlives. Most tellingly, it portrays Tian Han’s last wife, An E 安娥 (1905-1976), herself a Soviet-educated poet and communist activist, as a ‘Red Salomé’, who supplied Tian with the perfect combination of sexual and revolutionary inspirations. Opening with the staging of Wilde’s Salomé as a ‘play within a play’, and ending with Tian Han, the ‘Red Salomé’ An E, and all on stage singing ‘March of the Volunteers’, the Chinese national anthem with Tian’s lyrics, Hurricane consolidated the crucial importance of staging Salomé in China via the prism of Tian Han, throughout the past century and in our present times.
Tian Han’s translation of Salomé as ‘Shalemei’ 沙樂美 is first published in the Chinese-language journal Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (The Young China) in Beijing in March 1921, when Tian was still in Tokyo. It was prefaced by a poem dedicated to Wilde and Tian written by Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892-1978), known as a rising romantic poet, and who was also sojourning in Japan at the time. Titled ‘Misangsuoluopu’ zhi yege’ ‘密桑索羅普’之夜歌 (‘A Misanthrope’s Nocturne’), Guo painted the image of a first-person loner ‘wrapped in a milk-white peacock cloak’ in the first stanza of his poem. However, rather than having the ‘I’ ‘sinking to the dark seabed’, Guo’s second and last stanza turned the misanthrope into a fighter, who would ‘live in the ethereal silver light’ and ‘march on and on’ toward the bright moon ahead.[2] Such a dual interpretation of the darkness and the fighting spirit of Wilde’s famously decadent play by a Chinese poet is indicative of the cultural milieu in which Tian’s decades’ long engagement with the Salomé trope is situated. It also provides an entryway into the cultural politics behind Tian’s staging of Salomé in Shanghai in 1929, as well as how the image of Salomé would be reenacted in Hurricane in the twenty-first century.
Specifically, Tian Han belonged to the generation of the Chinese avant-garde artists active in the May Fourth movement, a nation-wide new cultural movement named after student demonstrations on 4 May 1919 in Beijing against the Treaty of Versailles, as the treaty came to represent an imperialist dismissal of Chinese self-determination for the students and the public. Tian’s sympathies were firmly with the prevailing romantic and anti-imperialist mood of the May Fourth moment. But to understand the ideological developments of the May Fourth period, one must go beyond Marxism alone to understand the immense and sudden interest in socialism in general. In this expansive context, not only was anarchism as important as Bolshevism, but the democratic energies of social democracy and liberalism were also part of the matrix of influences out of which a generation of avant-garde artists and activists arose. Tian Han is of particular importance in linking people of different political and cultural persuasions across party and ideological divides.
Tian Han published his translation of Salomé in the Young China Association’s (YCA) official journal, Shaonian zhongguo (The Young China) (the YCA was a network of professional revolutionaries who variously advocated for anarchism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, and Marxism). For some, the important role played by Li Dazhao and the involvement of Mao Zedong in the YCA seem to suggest a cultural politics leading to the rise of the CCP, as both later emerged as important players in the communist party. However, the political orientations of the society before the founding of the CCP were much more wide-ranging and should not read as a linear trajectory towards communism. Most importantly for Tian Han, his politics at the time was closer to a new trinity of spirituality, art, and politics, which could then be translated into a doctrine of ‘ethical activism’. This new form of activism aspired to remedy not only the rational scientific tradition, which had proven itself a failure in the face of war, but also the ‘inhumane’ materialist focus of socialism and communism.
Fig. 1: first page of Tian Han’s translation of Salomé, prefaced by a poem from Guo Moruo, in Shaonian Zhongguo (The Young China), 2 (9) (March 1921), Beijing.
Encountering Salomé in Tokyo
During Tian Han’s Tokyo sojourn (1916-1922), Oscar Wilde’s Salomé had become extremely popular in Japan. The play was presented to the public by various Japanese actresses in no fewer than 27 separate productions between its stage premiere by Matsui Sumako 松井須磨子 (1886-1919) in 1913 and the end of the Taishō era in 1926.[3] A fan of Sumako and having missed her prime time performing as Salomé, Tian recorded watching the Japanese Staging of Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell) by Gerhart Hauptmann, starring Sumako as the forest spirit Rautendelein, as his most memorable theatre encounter in Tokyo in 1918. Sumako, with her creative rendering of some of the most memorable Western heroines on the Japanese modern stage, including Nora, Katusha, Carmen, and most importantly Salomé, 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 and the real life Ibsenite ‘new woman’ and ‘modern girl’ (moga in Japanese). Her suicide following director Shimamura Hōgetsu’s death in January 1919, who was her lover, activated the tragic suicides and deaths in Salomé and greatly impacted Tian Han’s views on art and life.
Fig. 2: Matsui Sumako as Salomé, Imperial Theatre (Teikoku Gekijō), 1913, Tokyo. Available here.
As we shall see, Salomé became a potent trope in Tian Han’s oeuvre. And, indeed, she was the ultimate embodiment of an emerging modern female sexuality in the first decades of the twentieth century, on the Tokyo stage as elsewhere. Her sexually-charged ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, offered in exchange for her object of desire, John the Baptist’s head, was vividly rendered by Wilde in the 1890s and then popularized by Maud Allen in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Tian Han’s translation of Salomé into the Chinese vernacular in Tokyo in 1920 and publishing it in Beijing in 1921 and in Shanghai in 1922 need to be understood in this broad modernist context, with particular attention given to the historical specificities of post-WWI East Asian metropolises. In this context, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai provided productive cultural milieus for Tian Han to harvest transgressive female sexual energies and activate their revolutionary potentials, as reflected in his earnest pursuit of synthesizing Christian social gospel, neoromanticism, and social democracy.
Tian Han left Tokyo for Shanghai in 1922. His staging in Shanghai in 1929 of Salomé, now a symbol of both ‘night’ and ‘fire’, and both sexuality and revolution, was itself a way to process his Tokyo experience, to experiment with the art of performance, and to offer political commentary in the play’s subtext. Wilde’s play Salomé, as translated by Tian in Tokyo, went through new stages of mediations in Shanghai, via Hollywood film and Soviet modern dance, as well as experiments with Beijing Opera. These processes eventually made possible the staging of Salomé in the little theater format in Shanghai in 1929.
The Darkness of the Hollywood Vamp
The Salomé performance that Tian Han staged in Shanghai in 1929 was triggered by his viewing of a popular Hollywood rendering of the Wilde play, Salomé (1923, written and produced by and starring Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova), whose sets and costume designs were based on Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of the play. Created by a pioneering female star and producer and often considered the first art film in the United States, Nazimova’s Salomé has achieved cult status in film history.[4] Recently returned from Tokyo, Tian Han had just published his 1920 Chinese translation of the Wilde play as a separate volume in Shanghai in 1922, and he made sure to include Aubrey Beardsley’s original illustrations in this version. When Nazimova’s Salomé opened in Shanghai a few years after, its visual impact and sensual stimulus on Tian must have been truly powerful.
Fig. 3: Film still showcasing stage and costume designs for the 1923 film Salomé, written and produced by Alla Nazimova and with her in the title role.
Tian Han’s lifelong endeavor of ‘creating the new woman’ against the background of the Hollywood vamp tradition further confirms the central importance of this cinematic mediation. Such an obsession is a manifestation of a single passion to champion the oppressed gender and class in our society. In pursuit of his ideal ‘new woman’, Tian immortalized a series of powerful female images in print, on stage, and on screen, and his desire to engage with social problems also made possible a conversation among gender, performance, and politics. He developed his definition of the archetypal powerful and dangerous woman in relation to these images. Tian Han even created a Chinese transliteration of the English word vampire as fanpaiya 凡派亞, making its foreign origins explicit while at the same time trying to counterbalance the darkness associated with the word by avoiding a direct translation of its meaning. He was intrigued by the glamorous, ‘lusty, dangerous women on stage and screen’, whom he categorized as ‘vampires’, by which he meant women ‘who have strong self-consciousness, who value their own sensual fulfillment, or who desperately pursue sensual stimulation in their lives’, in effect conflating actors and their roles, and stage performance and real life. Among the Hollywood actresses embodying such a vamp spirit, he singled out Alla Nazimova as one of the major influences.[5] The popular cinematic form became a crucial channel through which to involve elites and masses alike. Through the mediation of the Hollywood screen, old stage performance could be democratized, and new stage performance could be created. Tian Han’s early embrace of the Hollywood vamp and his later reaction against its darkness, as seen in his recasting of the Salomé figure into the image of the White Snake originated from Chinese legend in his later years, are two sides of the same coin.[6]
The Fire of Soviet Modern Dance and Film
In addition to Hollywood film, Soviet modern dance constituted an important stimulus for the performance of Salomé in Shanghai in 1929. Tian Han’s first publication in Tokyo is on the Russian February Revolution and the issue of rich and poor.[7] His love of Russian literature and his embrace of Christian socialist thought through the Russian connection in Tokyo – including the not insignificant fact that the famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova had shared the stage with Tian’s play Lingguang (靈光 Spiritual Light) in Tokyo in 1920 – paved the way to a firm Russian/Soviet connection in Shanghai. Tian became acquainted with the Soviet consul in Shanghai through his personal connections. He was instrumental in organizing the premiere of Battleship Potemkin (1925), the leading Soviet avant-gardist filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s most recent film, among a small group of Soviet residents and local artists in Shanghai in 1926.[8]
A key incident in Tian Han’s contact with the Soviet cultural scene occurred when his Nanguo She 南國社 (Southland Institute) hosted a welcoming party for the visiting Duncan Dancing Troupe from the Soviet Union.[9] This encounter not only stimulated Tian’s creative energy but also provided a convenient rhetorical framework, namely, using politics to legitimize the aesthetic and endow art with a political edge, for the eventual staging of Salomé in Shanghai. Tian praised Irma Duncan’s dance as an expression of ‘the rebellion of the oppressed’ and the spirit of the contemporary Soviet Union (Irma Duncan was the student and adopted daughter of Isadora Duncan).[10] He made a further connection between Irma’s ‘pure’ ‘nontechnical’ style of dance and ‘modern literature’; since her modern dance originated from those ‘unconscious movements’ in our everyday lives, it embodied ‘symbols of suffering’ and expressions of the subconscious as had already been discussed by Kuriyagawa Hakuson 厨川白村 and Tian himself in Kyoto in 1921.[11]
Tian further concluded that Irma’s modern dance, with her red dress and bare feet, was like a call to arms, in which she led her followers in a fight against all evil and flew toward the land of light – and that was the ‘real dance for modern people’ (xiandairen de tiaowu 現代人的跳舞).[12] However, Tian Han’s admiration for Soviet modern dance in 1927, when he wrote the above piece, should not be uncritically equated with an easy identification with Soviet politics. Although he did join the CCP in 1932, quite a few years after this encounter and a few more years after putting Salomé on Shanghai stage in 1929, such an anticipatory reading into his future political affiliations may indeed limit our interpretative capacities of his hybrid political identities and ambiguous political identifications, which had much to do with the new trinity of spirituality, art, and politics formed during his Tokyo years.
Indeed, the ‘land of light’ imagery here echoes Guo Moruo’s reading of Salomé as inspirational and a revolutionary call to arms, in the style of the May Fourth new cultural activists, to rebel against tradition, authorities, and imperialism, and to pursue personal freedom, and sexual and spiritual liberation. Tian Han wrote ‘Kafeidian zhi yiye’ 咖啡店之一夜 (‘A Night in a Café’) in Tokyo while translating Salomé. Both texts were concerned with the struggle between the spirit and the flesh. Lin Zeqi, the male protagonist in Tian’s play, torn between competing desires, confesses, ‘Spirit-flesh. Flesh-spirit. They are battling inside me. I feel so restless. My sorrow is like the fire in hell burning deep in my heart. Recently I have been tempted by death. I often feel that the God of death with his black wings stretched wide is calling me’.[13] This is a direct borrowing from Salomé, where John the Baptist states, ‘Art thou not afraid, daughter of Herodias? Did I not tell thee that I had heard in the palace the beating of the wings of the angel of death?’[14] Tian Han’s commentary on Irma’s dance highlighted the use of the female body and feminine charm to achieve an ultimate ‘revolutionary’ goal, leading her followers to the land of light and away from the black wings of death. Such an image of a female messiah recalls the female Faust and the role of the café waitress in Tian’s earlier experiments, where romantic love and sexuality are portrayed as the ultimate weapons with which to engender political activism. Tian’s staging of Salomé a few years later bear some of the imprints of his encounter with Irma Duncan’s luminous modern dance and the continuing resonance of the enlightening spiritual lights from his Tokyo experience.
Tian Han’s passionate encounter with the Salomé trope was further intensified through an avant-gardist restaging of an archetypal female figure in the experimental Beijing Opera Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮. Tian warmly embraced Ouyang Yuqian’s reinvention of Pan Jinlian (Golden Lotus), a symbol of adultery and female sexuality as canonized in such classic novels as Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin) and Jinping mei (Plum in a Golden Vase). Ouyang reconfigured Golden Lotus as ‘a woman longing for power and beauty’, as someone with the ‘Salomé spirit’.[15] When writing a Beijing Opera, Wu Song, based on the same story in the 1940s, Tian Han continued to evoke the Salomé trope and commented on the reinvented Golden Lotus image as ‘a reincarnation of Salomé’.[16] Tian saw Alla Nazimova’s 1923 Hollywood rendering of Salomé in Shanghai around the time of the Pan Jinlian performance in 1926 and started to realize his own conceptions of Salomé through his ideal ‘vampirish’ actress on the Shanghai stage.
The Ideal Actress
The actual performance of Salomé on the Chinese stage would have to wait until 1929, when Tian Han eventually found his ideal Salomé in Yu Shan 俞珊 (1908-1968), an aspiring young actress related to a high-ranking official in the Nationalist Party.[17] Performance stills of Yu Shan as Salomé were widely published in literary and general interest journals such as Shidai huabao (Times Illustrated) and Nanguo yuekan (Southland Monthly) in 1929. One of them shows Yu Shan dancing as Salomé in a seductive dress (for the taste of the Chinese audience at the time), with bare shoulder and feet, her arms stretched out in the shape of a snake, and her black hair curled up on her cheek in snakelike curls. The multivalent snake symbolism challenges Christian iconography with a heroic seductress, while also gesturing toward the Chinese White Snake legend so central to Tian Han’s work as a whole.
Fig. 4: Top: performance still of Yu Shan posing as Salomé; bottom: Yu Shan as Salomé holding the head of John the Baptist (performed by Chen Ningqiu), directed by Tian Han, photo by Guang Yi, Southland Institute, 1929, Shanghai, in Shidai huabao (Times Illustrated), no. 1 (October 1929).
Another stage picture shows Yu Shan as Salomé holding the head of John the Baptist, again with her snakelike curls in view. Her face is covered with golden powder, with her eyes carefully outlined in dark eye shadows. Here this westernized femme fatale is accompanied by the effeminate appearance of John the Baptist, performed by Chen Ningqiu.[18] Once again the Salomé trope represents ‘masculinity besieged’ by feminine transgression, evoking the powerfully seductive Hollywood vamp as well as the revolutionary spirit of Soviet modern dance as mediated by Tian Han in Shanghai.[19]
The cast for Salomé was an artistically exceptional one, with Yu Shan as Salomé; Wan Laitian, with his ‘lion’s hair and antelope’s eyes’, as Herodias; the ‘Korean Valentino’ Jin Yan,[20] with his melancholic expression, as the Young Syrian; and the ‘Poet of the World of the Spirit’, Chen Ningqiu, as John the Baptist.[21] The set design and ‘realistic scenery’ for the Salomé performance were firsts of their kind in theater circles at the time. But the ultimate charm of the performance, according to set designer and violin accompanist Wu Zuoren, came from the ‘beautiful and expressive’ rising star Yu Shan, whose bold and forceful performance as Salomé was contagiously passionate.[22] In 1929, the same year in which Salomé was staged, when commenting on ‘art and its relationship with its times and politics’, Tian Han declared that ‘art is the leap of soul, it leans toward idealism; while politics aims at maintaining the status quo . . . art as an indicator is more sensitive than politics, it is the vanguard of politics’.[23]
In his essay ‘Gongyan zhiqian’ (‘Before the Public Performance’), Tian Han describes Salomé in a politicized tone with a renewed affinity for the ‘red revolution’. He upholds Wilde’s play as a call for humanist liberation and national salvation, an eccentric interpretation not shared by many others at the time.[24] Tian Han’s political rhetoric cannot hide his obsession with the deadly seductiveness of erotic love at the core of the Salomé play, already engrained in his artistic sensibility in Tokyo. One might ask how the play’s decadent sensibility, perceived as counterrevolutionary by many, could be construed as revolutionary. The answer is that for Tian Han and many of his fellow avant-gardists, Salomé’s aggressive female sexuality is an embodiment and displacement of radical revolutionary energy. The climate of social and political revolution granted the point of entry for the Salomé play in 1929. For Tian Han, the play had already long preoccupied him, seeming to hold the answer to his insistent, restless search for sexual, spiritual, and political liberation.
This Salomé complex was further manifested in Tian Han’s 1930 article on contemporary Soviet cinema based on two essays written by a real life ‘Red Salomé’, the Moscow-educated ‘Miss Sonia’.[25] Tian borrowed Sonia’s introduction of the Soviet director Yakov Protazanov’s Sorok pervyy (Forty-First, 1927) in his essay. The storyline of a fisherman’s daughter turned Red Army solider Maryutka, and her love-hate relationship with a White Army officer on a deserted island, clearly enchanted Tian and captured his imagination. He could not help describing the Saloméan moment after the female soldier shot the officer. Holding her lover’s bloody head, she cries, ‘Oh, my . . . my sweetheart . . . your beautiful eyes’.[26] Tian’s commentary on this scene, while intended to criticize the Salomé trope through class analysis, only served to reveal his obsession with the seductive power of the Salomé figure, both in the story and in real life. It is through the film story of Maryutka that Tian Han introduced to his Shanghai readers the enigmatic Soviet-educated ‘Miss Sonia’, a pen name for An E, the real life ‘Red Salomé’ who entered Tian’s personal life around this time.[27] In the twenty-first century, both Wilde’s Salomé and An E the ‘Red Salomé’ would return to the Chinese stage in order to tell the story of Tian Han at the intersection of sexuality and revolution.
What made Tian Han’s engagement with the figure of Salomé throughout the 1920s and its afterlives in contemporary China so fascinating and important has much to do with its embodiment of a complex range of shifting and competing cultural and political positions from Tokyo, Shanghai, and Beijing. The symbolisms of Salomé traveled between social democracy and communism, between Hollywood and Moscow, between sexuality and revolution, and between the 1920s and the 2020s. The PRC’s commemorations of Tian Han as a founding figure of the country and celebrating his works on the occasions of the 80th and 100th anniversaries of the founding of the CCP should not lead to a simplistic reading of the cultural politics of staging Salomé in China as a linear progression of ‘making Salomé red (communist)’. Rather, it indicates the difficulties and struggles of taking in a cultural icon at a foundational moment of one’s own identity formation, and the mutually constitutive power of making it anew, with resources both homegrown and international, both local and global.
Notes
[1] Tian Han’s translation of Salomé was likely based on the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play, translated from the French, illustrated by Audrey Beardsley, and published by Elkin Mathews & John Lane in London in 1894. He likely also consulted its French original and available Japanese introductions and translations of the play, including Mori Ōgai’s summary of Salomé published in the August 1907 issue of Kabuki, the very first time the play was introduced to Japan. For more on Tian Han’s engagement with the Salomé trope from Tokyo to Shanghai, from the wartime Chinese hinterland to Beijing, and from the 1920s to the 1960s, see Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
[2] For Tian Han’s translation of Salomé, see Tian Han, trans., ‘Shalemei’, Shaonian zhongguo, 2 (9) (March 1921). It was first published in book form by Zhonghua shuju (China Books), with Audrey Beardsley’s illustrations, in 1922 in Shanghai.
[3] Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 219.
[4] Jennifer Horne, ‘Alla Nazimova’, in Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds., Women Film Pioneers Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013).
[5] Tian Han, ‘Fanpaiya de shiji’ (‘A Century of Vampires’, 1927), in Tian Han sanwenji (Collected Essays of Tian Han) (Shanghai: Jindai Shudian, 1936), 148-49; Tian Han misspelled Alla Nazimova’s name as Anna Nazimova on p. 148.
[6] For more on Tian Han’s recreating Salomé in the Beijing Opera White Snake in the 1950s and the forming of a global White Snake archive deeply connected to the Salomé trope, see ‘A White Snake in Beijing: Re-creating Socialist Opera’, in Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Chapter 5; and Liang Luo, The Global White Snake (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021).
[7] Tian Han, “Eguo jinci zhi geming yu pinfu wenti” (The Russian Revolution and the Issue of Rich and Poor). Shenzhou xuecong (Divine Land Review), no. 1 (September 1917).
[8] Tian Han, ‘Women de ziji pipan’ (‘Our Self-criticism’, 1930), in Tian Han quanji (Complete Works of Tian Han) (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 2000, vol. 15), 103.
[9] The Duncan Dancing Troupe’s German background further complicates this Soviet connection. It’s debatable whether one can call Irma Duncan’s dance troupe or movement Soviet. It was both European and, in some ways, American, mediated through the Soviet Union. Certainly, this represents an encounter with international modernism. Tian Han intentionally represented this encounter as specifically Soviet in spirit.
[10] Tian Han, ‘Shuofeng’ (‘Harsh Wind’, 1927), in Tian Han quanji, vol. 13, 83-84.
[11] Tian Han was referring to Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s influential work Kumon no shōchō (Symbols of Agony) and his visit to Kuriyagawa in Kyoto in the spring of 1921.
[12] Tian Han, ‘Shuofeng’, in Tian Han quanji, vol. 13, 83-85.
[13] Tian Han, ‘Kafei dian zhi yiye’ (‘A Night in a Café’), Chuangzao jikan (Creation Quarterly), 1, (1) (1922), in Tian Han quanji, vol. 1, 109-10.
[14] Qtd. in Linda Wong, ‘“Undecadent” Representations of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in Modern China’, in Decadence (Fin de Siècle) in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation, ed. by Marián Gálik (Bratislava: Institute of Oriental and African Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2005), 103.
[15] Ouyang Yuqian, ‘Pan Jinlian’, in Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology, ed. by Edward M. Gunn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
[16] Tian Han, ‘Guanyu Wu Song yu Pan Jinlian’, Pinglun bao (Kunming), 12 May 1945, in Tian Han quanji, vol. 17, 335-37.
[17] Yu Shan came from the prominent Yu family in Shanyin (Shaoxing), Zhejiang. Yu made her name acting as Salomé and Carmen in Tian’s productions in 1929 and 1930, respectively. See Wang Mingjian, ‘Yu Shan: Minguo caizi milian de jiaren’, Wenshi bolan, 5 (2009).
[18] For more on Chen Ningqiu and his reputation as an anti-Japanese poet, lyricist, dramatist, and film worker, see Han Sanzhou, ‘Yan’an “guairen” Sai Ke de “guaishi”’, Gejie, 3 (2011), 32.
[19] For an informative discussion of masculinity in contemporary Chinese literature, see Xueping Zhong, Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
[20] Hye Seung Chung, ‘The Korean Valentino: Jin Yan (Kim Yŏm), Sino-Korean Unity, and Shanghai Films of the 1930s’, Korean Studies 37 (2013), 150-70.
[21] See Tang Shaohua, Wentan wangshi jianzheng (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1996).
[22] See Zhou Zhaokuan, ed., Yiwei rensheng: Wu Zuoren de yisheng (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin meishu chubanshe, 1998).
[23] Tian Han, ‘Yishu yu shidai ji zhengzhi zhi guanxi’, in Tian Han nianpu, ed. by Zhang Xianghua (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1992), 129.
[24] Tian Han, ‘Gongyan zhiqian: Ti ziji hanjiao, ti minzhong hanjiao’, in Tian Han quanji, 15, 174-77.
[25] Tian Han, ‘Sulian dianying yishu fazhan de jiaoxun yu woguo dianying yundong de qiantu’, Nanguo yuekan, 2, (4) (20 July 1930), in Tian Han quanji, vol. 18, 74-95.
[26] Ibid., 80.
[27] Contemporary Chinse avant-gardist director Tian Qinxin’s 2001 stage play about Tian Han’s romantic relationships with four modern women, Kuangbiao (Hurricane), re-creates An E, Tian Han’s lifelong companion in art, revolution, and love, as a ‘Red Salomé’. See Tian Qinxin, Kuangbiao, in Tian Qinxin de xiju ben (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2010).