Bad Women of China follows three generations of Chinese women from the 1920s to the present day. All are posed as renegades in their own right, though some are more revolutionary than others.
★★★★✰
In the middle of the timeline we find filmmaker and activist He Xiaopei, who uses her daughter, Qiao, to get ‘Mother’ to talk to her again after years of the silent treatment. He draws out similarities between the generations; all three sought foreign languages and travel, and were flirts. “I didn’t think he was handsome, but he was a hero,” says Mother, one of the few references to the absent grandfather and father of the family.
It’s a characteristically direct and political assertion of Mother, the documentary’s most compelling subject. A strong-minded. independent woman—from youth, she rejected her sister’s desire to marry a rich husband—we hear her describe her life in her own words, from her time at Beijing City and the Revolutionary University to the Chinese government’s Foreign Language Institute.
This agency subtly challenges stereotypes about the status of women, and individuals more widely, in China. Mother’s complex thoughts about the Cultural Revolution only underscore the film’s point. She plainly states she “couldn’t give birth” to her last two children, because she was belatedly deemed a Rightist (anti-government intellectual). Another ‘contradiction’, or nod to the post-truth context of the Revolution—all Rightists were to be declared by 1957, but this was extended to 1958, when the State ‘hadn’t met the quota’.
Sent to the countryside—much like the father of contemporary artist Ai Weiwei—Mother managed her internment by taking night classes, avoiding the gossipy character posters pasted up by her fellow comrades with her foreign language books in the library.
She casually passes off these symptoms of the sort of isolation articulated by Hannah Arendt in ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’. And, at the same time, we see her own empathy when she speaks of her own mother, who died of starvation a generation earlier. These juxtaposing scenes reinforce the emotional complexity of women, so often denied in existing on-screen narratives.
With a stiff upper-lip, she proclaims: “he Rightist movement had no impact on me. My lot in the Cultural Revolution wasn’t bad.” She remarks on her luck, at having not had her head shaved. She remained loyal to the Communist Party, at least outwardly, for its unchanged principals. Her daughter offers a neat and lyrical summary: “She gave her love to the party and saved her grudges for family.”
Indeed, it is this relationship between Mother and filmmaker that is the most intersesting. Commonalities are quietly woven throughout; it’s almost unnecessary that they are made so explicitly, in captions, at the end.
As a Central Government diplomat, He Xiaopei’s exposure to Western influences encouraged her to become a ‘woman hooligan’. She was the only Chinese woman who dared enter the American ‘Lesbian Tent’. Again, perhaps contrary to assumptions, Mother was more disapproving of her first marriage to a man. Her daughter, Qiao, seems more detached, and winds up following a similar path as the filmmaker to the UK; perhaps in a bid to belatedly connect.
Abandonment, loss, and political turmoil are received by all three women with humour, here a form of social coping. We see the oldest woman’s defeated sighs at a ‘Great Wall of Vagina’ postcard, candid mother-daughter conversations and phone calls from nightclubs. At times, their relationships seem almost unbelievable, all more filial than maternal. But they are foregrounded by the tensions shared—and passed on—between generations.
The Verdict
Bad Women of China is an intimate family history. Photographs, postcards, and lyrical captions are interspersed between interviews, filmed like archive footage. The three generations’ stories are used to tell broader alternative histories of China, from women- and Asian-centric perspectives. For some audiences at the Queer East Festival, it may be the first time they hear World War II described as the ‘Anti-Japanese War’, or 1953 as the ‘war to resist the US and defend Korea’. It’s a story with an ambiguous ending—fitting for these personal stories, and national histories, which continue on.
Words by Jelena Sofronijevic
Bad Women of China premieres in the UK on 27 April 2023, as part of Queer East Festival 2023.
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