



Tsui Hark’s 2014 lm The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan) is the latest in a long line of adaptations of Qu Bo’s historical novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), one of the most canonized and adapted revolutionary works in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay seeks to trace the success of Tsui’s remake to its melodramatic recon guration of history, memory and nostalgia. Speci cally, it investigates the ways in which the lm undercuts the reverential Maoist revolutionary discourse inherent in the original source material by modeling on the wuxia (martial arts) paradigm. In addition, the essay argues that by bookending the 1946 war story with a 2015-set prologue and epilogue, Tsui’s adaptation presents the audiences with an exquisite example of how memory invokes and re-presents the past, and ultimately points to the ctionality of the reconstructed past. Finally, the essay focuses on the lm’s self- consciously simulacral status, and argues that Tsui is motivated by a desire to address the prevailing social climate of excessive commercialization and moral decay in contemporary China, and his retelling of a revolutionary tale is deeply implicated in nostalgic longing for idealism of a bygone era.




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What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It? Nostalgia, Intertextuality and Reconstructing Revolutionary Myth in Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy
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Wendy Xie
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What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It? Nostalgia, Intertextuality and Reconstructing Revolutionary Myth in Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy
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What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?
Nostalgia, Intertextuality and Reconstructing Revolutionary
Myth in Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy
Wendy Xie, Appalachian State University




Abstract

   Tsui Hark’s 2014 film The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu
   weihushan) is the latest in a long line of adaptations of Qu Bo’s historical novel
   Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), one of the most canonized and
   adapted revolutionary works in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay seeks to trace the
   success of Tsui’s remake to its melodramatic reconfiguration of history, memory
   and nostalgia. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which the film undercuts
   the reverential Maoist revolutionary discourse inherent in the original source
   material by modeling on the wuxia (martial arts) paradigm. In addition, the essay
   argues that by bookending the 1946 war story with a 2015-set prologue and
   epilogue, Tsui’s adaptation presents the audiences with an exquisite example
   of how memory invokes and re-presents the past, and ultimately points to the
   fictionality of the reconstructed past. Finally, the essay focuses on the film’s self-
   consciously simulacral status, and argues that Tsui is motivated by a desire to
   address the prevailing social climate of excessive commercialization and moral
   decay in contemporary China, and his retelling of a revolutionary tale is deeply
   implicated in nostalgic longing for idealism of a bygone era.

   In the final week of 2014, the Chinese audience, old and young, flocked
to the theaters across the country to watch Tsui Hark’s film The Taking of
Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan; Taking of Tiger Mountain
henceforth), making it one of the highest-grossing films of all time in
Chinese cinemas. More remarkable than its commercial success, the film
was heaped with critical acclaim. Tsui’s film is the latest in a lengthy line of
adaptations of Qu Bo’s massively popular 1957 novel Tracks in the Snowy
Forest (Linhai xueyuan; Tracks henceforth), one of the most canonized Red
Classics (a collection of the canonical Chinese socialist literary, theatrical
and cinematic works depicting the Communist armed struggle produced
in the PRC between 1949 and 1966). 1958 saw the first adaptations of the
novel in the form of a spoken drama and multiple versions of Peking opera.
Impressed by the stage version of Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe, Mao’s
wife, Jiang Qing, supervised a revision and renamed it Taking Tiger Mountain
by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan, Group of the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe,

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                            Wendy Xie


1963). Jiang’s version won the approval of communist party leaders at the
1964 National Peking Opera Convention and, after further revisions, was
selected as one of the Eight Model Revolutionary Works in 1966. Arguably
the best-known of the very few operas allowed to be staged in China during
the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), its main characters became household
names, especially after it was made into a film by Xie Tieli in 1970.1 The 1970
version is the one that Tsui remembers watching in New York’s Chinatown
in the 1970s, an experience that presumably sparked his desire to retell
and re-interpret the story.2 Tsui was keenly aware of his film’s intertextual
predecessors and acknowledged the circulation and interplay of meaning
across numerous preexisting texts when he confessed in his interview: ‘I
approached this iconic story with utmost respect and caution’.3
   We could not help but wonder: how did a Hong-Kong based and US-
educated director like Tsui Hark successfully tap into the cultural-historic
source of the red classics while his peer filmmakers in the mainland struggled
to re-package the revolutionary past for contemporary audiences?4 What
set of social-political circumstances impelled broad public to identify so
strongly with such a film? These questions make the film an interesting case
study of the discursive relationship among history, memory, narrative, and
subjectivity. In the following, I begin with the relationship between Chinese
revolutionary classics and traditional vernacular fiction. Then I proceed to
explore the vexed interrelation of nostalgia, historicity, and re-presentation
of past in Tsui’s remake.




1
  For an excellent analysis of the poetics of Xie’s screen adaptation, see Chris Berry, ‘Red Poetics:
The Films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Revolutionary Model Operas’, in The Poetics of
Chinese Cinema, ed. by Gary Bettinson and James Udden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),
pp. 29–49.
2
  Rui Zhang, ‘Tsui Hark revives China’s red classic’, in China.org <http://www.china.org.cn/
arts/2014-12/22/content_34380847.htm> [accessed 12 July 2017].
3
  Yang Xiao, ‘Taking of the Tiger Mountain Qiang Qiang San Ren Xing: Interview with Tsui Hark,
Zhang Hanyu and Liang Jiahui’, in news.ifeng <http://news.ifeng.com/a/20141229/42817262_0.
shtml> [accessed 12 May 2017]. Unless indicated otherwise, translations from Chinese are those
of the author. On Tsui Hark’s reworking literary and filmic classics prior to making Taking of
Tiger Mountain, see Po Fung, ‘Re-Interpreting Classics: Tsui Hark’s Screenwriting Style and Its
Influence’, in The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark and Hong Kong Film, ed. by Sam Ho
and Ho Wai-leng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002), pp. 64-69.
4
  Tsui was certainly not the first Hong Kong filmmaker, who went north of the border to embrace
the vast mainland Chinese film market. After the inauguration of the Closer Economic Partnership
Agreement in 2003, which exempted Hong Kong-China co-productions from the import quota
in mainland China, Hong Kong’s film industry entered an age of co-productions with mainland
studios. However, the phenomenon of Hong Kong veterans directing ‘main melody’ films (the
Chinese government’s official name for the revolutionary propaganda genre) started with
Tsui’s Taking of Tiger Mountain.

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                           What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?


    Wuxia Paradigm and Reconstructing Revolutionary Myth

   The bulk of Taking of Tiger Mountain takes place in the snowy mountains
of northeastern China in 1946 amid the civil war (after the Japanese had been
defeated in the Second World War). A squad of the Communist People’s
Liberation Army, Unit 203, is tasked to take down a gang of bandits, led by Lord
Hawk, headquartered at a former Japanese fortress and arsenal atop of Tiger
Mountain. Outgunned, outmanned and with time running short, the squad
attempts to accomplish its mission by sending one of their men, Yang Zirong,
to infiltrate the bandits’ camp. Posing as a fellow bandit, Zirong surreptitiously
smuggles out information regarding the stronghold so that his squad can plan
an attack. Hawk and some of the other bandits are suspicious of the newcomer’s
motives, and Zirong is constantly tested for his loyalty. Zirong eventually forms
an alliance with Qinglian, Hawk’s kidnapped concubine, who uses her feminine
wiles to try to escape Hawk’s clutches. Their alliance is formed after she learns
that her son, Knotti, whom she was forced to leave behind, has been rescued
by the PLA unit. With Zirong’s help, Unit 203 launches its attack on Tiger
Mountain during a New Year’s Eve celebration and triumphantly brings Hawk
and his gang down.5
   One of the reasons that Tsui felt such an affinity for an iconic red classic
can be partly attributed to the fact that Qu’s novel, despite its revolutionary
realism trappings of the 1950s, reads like a ‘chaptered novel’ deeply rooted in
Chinese vernacular fictional tradition, with larger-than-life heroes and legendary
adventures. Unlike many of his contemporary writers, who were trained in the
leftist, socialist realistic rhetoric and literature, Qu had little formal orthodoxy
revolutionary education in writing. But he was well read in classical Chinese
fiction. In his post-scripts to Tracks, Qu confesses that his true literary
imagination is fueled by classical novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms
(Sanguo yanyi, Luo Guanzhong, fourteenth-century; Romance henceforth) and
Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan, Shi Nai’an, sixteen-century) from which he could
recite long passages from memory. Believing that the traditional aesthetics is
well suited for the narration of a revolutionary story, Qu acknowledges, ‘when I
wrote [Tracks], I tried hard to write in the traditional style in terms of structure,
language, characterizations’.6
   Robert E. Hegel offers an in-depth and illuminating study of the parallels of
Tracks with classical vernacular fiction and identifies Qu’s debt to Water Margin
and Romance. Most obviously, Qu Bo adapts a well-known Water Margin episode:

5
  Tsui’s fascination with narratives set in China’s Republican era (1912–1949) can be traced
back to as early as his 1986 film Peking Opera Blues, which centers on three young women from
different social classes who become embroiled in a revolutionary plot to overthrow the military
government. For a comprehensive discussion of the film, see Tan See Kam, Tsui Hark’s Peking
Opera Blues (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016).
6
  Bo Qu, Lin Hai Xue Yuan [Tracks in the Snowy Forest] (Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she,
1997), p. 588.

                                                                                            73
     Wendy Xie




       Figs. 1-2. Undated photograph of Zirong (on the
       left); historical group photo (above).




                         Fig. 3. Re-enactment by the
                         film’s cast of the historical
                         group photo




                         Fig. 4. Photograph of Squad
                         203 after their Triumph at
                         Tiger Mountain. Photographer
                         unknown.




74
                            What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?


in the imitation of Wu Song killing the tiger with his bare hands while passing
through a mountainous region, Qu’s protagonist Zirong crosses a mountainous
region of China’s northeast and kills a tiger with his gun.7 In Tsui’s remake, the
tiger-killing scene is not only recast, but with the help of 3D technology and
CGI imagery, Zirong battling the hungry tiger on the treetops is one of the most
thrilling moments in the film. Later in the film, Tsui also made Zirong sing a song
with references to Zhao Zilong, one of the most celebrated heroes of Romance.8
   Moreover, Water Margin and Romance are military romances-cum-tales of
chivalry and literary antecedents of the wuxia (martial arts) genre. There are
many elements of the classical wuxia genre in Qu’s episodic adventure novel. For
instance, the opening chapter, titled ‘Blood Debt’, is a giveaway of the style of
the wuxia fiction. This chapter begins with the residents of an entire village being
brutally massacred by bandits, thus setting up the archetypical chivalric narrative
themes in the chapters to follow: bloodshed, grievances and revenge. The parallels
between Qu’s novel and the wuxia fiction are also evident in their worldviews.
Like wuxia writers, Qu perceived the world as polarized camps. His communist
heroes, like his wuxia counterparts, seek to find justice in an unjust world with
a clear definition between right and wrong, with the only difference that in Qu’s
adaption, justice for individuals is replaced with a collectivist cause. In addition,
Qu drew the characterizations of his heroes and villains from the wuxia tradition
that emphasizes type-characters and clearly defined role categories with the
extremes of behavior. The PLA soldiers are portrayed as virtuous, principled,
and altruistic heroes in their quest to eliminate evil on behalf of the oppressed.
They exhibit a clear affinity to the traditional knight-errant in their unflagging
strength and courage. As the perfect embodiment of selfless devotion to the
communists’ goals, they are utterly lacking in moral, political and ideological
ambiguities and complexities. By contrast, the bandits are treacherous, covetous
and sadistic villains. They are depicted with an almost cartoon-like exaggeration
of insidiousness.
   As a member of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tsui is responsible for reviving
and reshaping the Chinese wuxia films at the end of the 1970s and start of the
1980s and known for his well-choreographed, imaginative action sequences. It
seems only logical for him to highlight the wuxia elements embedded in the Mao-
era red classic and rework it into a ‘wuxia film with guns’. In a classical wuxia


7
  Robert E. Hegel, ‘Making the Past Serve the Present in Fiction and Drama from the Yan’an
Forum to the Cultural Revolution’, in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s
Republic of China 1949-1979, ed. by Bonnie S. McDougall (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), pp. 197–223 (p. 215). For further discussion on the intersection between classical
vernacular fiction and revolutionary discourse in Tracks, see Krista Van Fleit Hang, Literature the
People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966) (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), pp. 91–117.
8
  The military Song of Beiyang Army’s 4th Division during the Republic of China sung by Zirong
has the following lyrics: ‘Among all the heroes of the Three Kingdoms, Zhao Zilong was the best.
At the Battle of Changban, on full display was his bravery’.

                                                                                                 75
     Wendy Xie


                 Figs. 5-8.
                 The Taking of Tiger Mountain. Scene
                 stills.




76
                         What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?


fashion, Tsui uses the vast sparsely populated mountains of Manchuria covered
with snow, the pine forests, a steam locomotive snaking through the ice, and a
gothic castle built with huge cement, as the backdrop for the actions. In a keen
reminder of the imaginary, utopian world jianghu (literally ‘rivers and lakes’), the
good (PLA soldiers) and bad knights-errant (bandits) engage in an epic battle
based on the codes of xia: justice, altruism, loyalty, bravery, and righteousness.
   Zirong in Tsui’s version is a more complex character than in Qu’s novel. It
involves another archetypical stratagem of the wuxia genre: a flawed hero succeeds
in overcoming a rapacious and powerful villain. At the start of the film, Zirong
joins the squad as an outsider and, with his full beard and unusual outfit, looks
like a bandit more than a PLA soldier. When the squad commander expresses
mistrust based on his non-soldier like behaviors, Zirong feels compelled to resign
from the PLA to assume his undercover disguise. Disobeying orders from his
commanding officer and acting on his own initiative set Zirong apart from the
one-dimensional communist hero portrayed in Qu’s original work. Upon entering
the bandits’ lair, Zirong outsmarts the bandits with incredible skills and courage.
In all these, Zirong seems to pose as a stand-in for wuxia genre’s wandering,
chivalrous swordsman seeking self-serving adventures.
   At the core of the wuxia genre is the well-choreographed spectacle of violence
— heroes and villains fighting each other and performing extravagant feats.
Taking of Tiger Mountain models on the wuxia paradigm and overloads the
viewer’s senses with bullets-flying and blood- spurting shootouts between the
PLA and the bandits. There are three major action sequences in the film —
the opening warehouse skirmish, the bandits’ attack on Leather Creek village,
and the final siege on Hawk’s mountain fortress. In his analysis of the Hong
Kong action film, David Bordwell stresses the importance of stasis in the
choreography of a fight sequence.9 One could argue that the narrative structure
of Tsui’s remake is organized around a ‘pause-thrust-pause’ pattern, with the
action sequences interspersed as pure spectacles to break the diegetic flow. The
moments of excessive violence, gunplay, and explosive pyrotechnics are best
displayed in slow motion cinematography or ‘Bullet Time’, as made popular by
the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy (1999-2003): the camera follows the advance of
bullets as they fly at and through their targets and sees how they ricochet through
them.
   While Qu deploys many fantastic elements and the episodic structure of the
wuxia fiction in the service of a narrative of communist liberation, it is interesting
to note that Tsui transforms an episode in China’s civil war between the
communists and the nationalists, a deeply political discourse, into an ideologically
neutral narrative of an epic battle between heroes and villains. The communist
propaganda, i.e. the logic of class struggle, is thus concealed and suspended


9
 David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 221–247.

                                                                                       77
                                            Wendy Xie


by a wuxia concept of good vs. evil.10 In the climactic finale, the PLA squad
commander says: ‘It’s over. I hope Knotti’s generation won’t see war again’. As
such Tsui’s representation of the communist history serves mainly to articulate
a value that is universal and undifferentiated: the belief in a better tomorrow,
which is apparently at odds with the hegemonic Maoist revolutionary discourse
of a ‘continuous revolution’. In fact, Tracks ends with the last entry of Jianbo’s
diary: ‘Today, a new struggle begins’. As Hegel rightly points out, ‘Qu Bo here
prefigures a sequel; his work thus becomes a single, multi-segmented episode
in the saga of the broader revolutionary struggle’. Although his larger-than-life
knights-errant fit well with the tradition of the Maoist hero: indomitable of spirit
and formidable of strength even in the face of the most pernicious obstacles,
Tsui slyly undercut the reverential Communist ideology of the highly political
original text by eliminating any symbols of political significance. Red stars, red
flags, PLA-specific cap insignias, and any mention of the communist party or
Chairman Mao are stripped away in his remake. Also, the Leather Creek villagers
are portrayed as cowards and in dire need of salvation, which is in stark contrast
to Qu’s portrayal of their impassionate support for the PLA soldiers. Eager to
fight Hawk and his men and by extension the nationalists, the villagers in Qu’s
narrative are not only the object of salvation but the agent of salvation. With the
political event being transformed into a chivalric tale, Tsui’s remake suggests a
degree of subversiveness and challenge to the government-sanctioned narrative
of history.


Nostalgia and Historical (In)authenticity

   As shown previously, Taking of Tiger Mountain’s emphasis on punishing
evil and exalting goodness and on a visual style less concerned with cinematic
verisimilitude than bombarding audiences with a series of images of spectacular
excess results in deliberate de-politicization of the highly propagandist narrative
inherent in the original source material. The strategic absences of political
consciousness are reinforced by Tsui’s inventing a modern-day narrator Jimmy
(played by Hang Geng, the Chinese Justin Timberlake), and bookending the
1946 war story with a 2015-set prologue and epilogue, thus recasting the historical
event into an individual, personal witness account. Tsui’s remake is often taken
to be a historical epic, but the individualist perspective points to the ultimate
fictionality of the narrative. I argue that this fictionality lays claim of the film as
an alternative to Maoist histories and presents us with an exquisite example of


10
  In this respect, Taking of Tiger Mountain feels like an update of The Raid that Tsui co-directed in
1991, which is based on the historical events of the 1930s, when Japanese-occupied Manchuria
have set up the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi as their puppet leader. Like Taking of Tiger Mountain,
The Raid uses the Sino-Japanese War as a backdrop for an action-adventure narrative that sidesteps
most political themes.

78
                            What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?


how memory invokes and re-presents the past. What is at stake here is not how
accurately the film recreates an episode from China’s civil war, but rather how, or
how far, it is shaped by a desire to offer a particular interpretation of the past, by
the cultural and political imperatives informing the film’s moment of production.
   Tracks has many autobiographical elements. The plot draws on its author’s
real-life experiences in the civil war. Shao Jianbo, the PLA squad commander,
bears a great resemblance to Qu, who commanded the squad himself that
defeated Hawk’s bandit gang. Zirong was closely based on one of Qu’s close
comrades-in-arms. Zirong, whose real name was used in the novel, was famous
for his experience in different trades and his expertise in local culture and bandit
argot. His versatile skills made him an ideal PLA scout after he joined the army.
In 1946, when his squad became aware of the hidden fortress of Hawk and his
gang, Zirong masqueraded as a bandit in a rival gang and went undercover. He
quickly won the trust of the bandits and eventually captured Hawk along with
25 other bandits. The head of the bandits, Hawk, and some minor characters,
such as Gao B, were modeled after real-life people as well. In fact, the novel
was mainly written to honor Qu’s memory of his fellow soldiers: ‘With utmost
respect, the book is dedicated to my heroic comrades-in-arms Yang Zirong and
Gao Bo’. Yet, based on Qu’s account, his first draft, which started with dry facts,
went through so many revisions that the final product was largely fictionalized
and dramatized.11 However, without being labeled or advertised as a memoir or
a realistic historical account, the novel never deterred its readers from reading it
as an autobiography.
   Tsui was fully aware of the connection between the fictional story and the
historical event when he concludes with his film with 3 black and white
photographs. The first one is an undated photograph of Zirong, the historical
figure, captioned by details of his life, such as the year of his birth and death, and
his original name and birthplace (fig. 1). The second one is a historical group
photo taken on August 1, 1946, featuring Zirong and his comrades-in-arms at
an awards ceremony (fig. 2). The photo then dissolves into a third photograph
and the final shot of the film, showing the heroes of the PLA squad celebrating
their triumphant attack at Tiger Mountain (fig. 3). Despite providing the illusion
of a historical moment coded in the past tense, the third photograph is in fact
a re-enactment by the film’s cast of the historical group gathering as recorded
in a 1946 photograph (fig. 4). While the inclusion of the first two historical
photographs integrates the historical event into the fictional world of the film’s
diegesis, the third image, in its sudden arrest of movement and black and white
contrast, functions as a mechanism of narrative closure and as a figure of aligning
the film with the authentic telling of history. The momentary ‘lapse’ from a ‘real’


11
   The popularity of the novel brought Qu’s former comrade-in-arms, Sun Dade, unexpected fame
and he suddenly found himself in high demand for interviews and speech tours. However, his
eyewitness account of the battle, a more accurate and closer version to historical truth without any
flourishes and embellishments, offered contrast to Qu’s fictionalized account.

                                                                                                 79
                                    Wendy Xie


representation into an imaginary one highlights the filmmaker’s conscious choice
of dialogue between history and the retelling of history and memory. Moreover,
the subtle blending of history and the imagining of history seems to emphasize
his efforts in erasing the mediation and its representational status.
   However, the very notion of ‘realness’ is cast into doubt by the film’s self-
conscious employment of a narrator. It begins with a present-day scenario that
portrays Jimmy, a young Chinese expat, fresh out of college and Silicon Valley-
bound, attending his farewell party thrown by a group of friends at a karaoke
bar in New York City. When a famous aria Climbing Tiger Mountain from
Tiger Mountain is queued up on the karaoke machine, the partygoers become
confused and quickly switch to another song. But Jimmy is mesmerized: the Tiger
Mountain story happens to be set in his hometown. After the party, he is due to
fly back to China to spend Chinese Lunar New Year with his family. On his way
to the airport, Jimmy decides to re-watch the aria on his phone (fig. 5). Safely
separated from the outside world in a mood of subjectivity, Jimmy’s viewing in
the taxi blends into a retelling of the first segment of the 1946 Tiger Mountain
tale taking place in China’s northeast — the warehouse skirmish between Hawk’s
men and PLA squad.
   The second sequence of the film begins with a historical steam locomotive
traveling through the snow-covered forests, which is soon superseded by a
contemporary high-speed bullet train apparently traveling the same route but
with the narrator Jimmy as one of its passengers. When Jimmy sets his eyes on
a sketchbook image featuring a sleeping woman, it dissolves into a shot of a
mysterious artist working on the sketch while traveling in the steam locomotive
back in 1946. This sequence concludes with a full-color image of the sunrise on
Tiger Mountain following the night of PLA’s victorious attack, which fades into
a sketch of the exact sunrise scenery in black and white. As the camera pulls
back to reveal it as an image in the sketchbook that Jimmy is holding, the film
returns to its present-day frame. The identity of the artist of the sketchbook is
now unmasked as Zirong. Thus, the second segment, starting with the entrance
of Zirong and ending with his squad’s defeat of Hawk, is framed by Jimmy’s
reminiscences and unfolds in one long flashback narrated from his point of view.
   The film’s present-day frame continues in the epilogue as Jimmy arrives at
Grandma’s house. Noticing the huge amount of food on New Year’s Eve’s dinner
table, Jimmy inquires if Grandma is expecting any guests. ‘What guests? They
are all family’, Grandma’s response triggers Jimmy to imagine the PLA squad
and Knotti being transported from 1946 and joining him at the table (fig. 6). It
is only now revealed that Knotti is Jimmy’s now deceased grandfather and the
young daughter of the Leather Creek village head, Little Juan, his grandmother.
Invoked by the sight of the heroes from the past, Jimmy recalls the hidden airstrip
at Tiger Mountain that his grandfather has mentioned and offers an alternate
ending to the wartime drama, in which Zirong duets with Hawk and eventually
rescues Qinglian, Jimmy’s great-grandmother, from a plane that Hawk is trying
to take off in an action-packed and spectacle-laden fashion. The final scene sees

80
                           What’s Chairman Mao Got to Do with It?


the film transition back to the present time with Grandma, Jimmy and the PLA
squad watching an iconic sequence from Tiger Mountain featuring Zirong’s first
encounter with Hawk at the bandits’ lair on TV (fig. 7). The camera gradually
closes in on the TV image until it takes over the full screen (fig. 8).
   Tsui’s employment of a personal narrator stands in stark contrast to his
predecessors. The earlier adaptations of Tracks, including the 1960 film and the
1986 and 2003 TV dramas, all use an opening crawl or a neutral authoritative
narrator’s voice to introduce the historical background of the story.12 With the
constructed nature of the fictional historical discourse being concealed by the
apparently unmediated, objective voice, the viewer is presented the illusion of
accurate representation of an actual past and historical reality. However, Jimmy’s
visible narrative presence in Tsui’s remake destroys any seeming transparency
to the past and prevents the film from ever taking on the appearance of a true
chronicle of events. The past is conjured up, restructured and reconstructed
through the eyes of an invented figure. The film is Jimmy’s personal, subjective
and partial reimagining of the 1946 event. His preoccupation with his own
family history and his urge to reconnect to the greatness of his forebears drive
the narrative. A grand narrative of class struggle and national salvation is thus
turned into a family legend.13
   Jimmy finds his connection to the past resonant with personal meaning and
through him multi-generational Chinese project their longing for the past onto
the screen. It is important to read nostalgic longing as fundamentally concerned
more with the present than with the past.14 Tsui’s film re-stages and re-packages
the revolutionary tale for contemporary audiences and speaks explicitly to
current social and political issues confronting Chinese society. With excessive
commercialization and ruthless market and profit-driven ambitions readily
embraced by as global norms, the post-Mao society in the past twenty years has
been pestered by commercialism, ethical relativism, and moral decay. In Tsui’s
remake, the lament about the loss of heroism and idealism today is translated into
the yearning for the glory of a bygone era. Tsui tries to re-appropriate the iconic



12
   For a more detailed comparison between Taking of Tiger Mountain and the previous adaptations,
see Zhang Xiuhe, ‘The Reincarnation of Tiger Mountain: Post-Socializing the Model Opera Film
(Yangbanxi)’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 2017), <https://sfsu-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/197283/AS362017FILMZ43.pdf?sequence=1>
[accessed 21 March 2018].
13
   Nathan To also points out the role of the narrator Jimmy in urging diasporic Chinese in
the West to rediscover their roots and heritage through a vision of re-connecting with the
Motherland, see ‘A Revolution for Memory: Reproductions of a Communist Utopia through
Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Posters from the Cultural Revolution’, in
Frames Cinema Journal <http://framescinemajournal.com/article/a-revolution-for-memory-
reproductions-of-a-communist-utopia-through-tsui-harks-the-taking-of-tiger-mountain-and-
posters-from-the-cultural-revolution/> [accessed 21 March 2018].
14
   Grainge, Paul, ‘Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods, Modes and Media Recycling’, in
Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23.1 (2000), 27–34 (p. 27).

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                                           Wendy Xie


idealism in the Red Classics and seems to be certain that the revival of heroism
and chivalry will fill the spiritual vacuum and purge society of threatening evils.15
   In Taking of Tiger Mountain, nostalgic longing is based on both memory and
imagination, inspired by Jimmy’s contact with representations, whether they
be his grandfather’s witness account (for that matter, legend), the historical
photographs, the 1970 model opera film that sandwiches his flashback to the
past, or Zirong’s sketchbook — apparently inherited from his grandfather. The
representations demonstrate Tsui’s attempt to forges explicit continuity with
its predecessors and to integrate his adaptation into authentic history. At the
same time, they are also unmistakable evidence of the film’s intertextuality and
its nostalgic structure. It is a reproduction of past modes of representational
styles and narratives that include productions and transpositions from Qu’s 1957
novel onward. In Tsui’s recreation of the wartime drama, historical reality and
its representation are collapsed and Tsui’s/Jimmy’s ‘reality’ takes on quotation
marks. With the modern-day framing device, its repeated quotation and revision
of pre-existing texts, the film is self-consciously positioned as representational
rather than original. Its self-consciously simulacral status undermines any claims
to verisimilitude and belies any attempts to read the film as historically ‘authentic’.
Like modeling on a wuxia paradigm and de-politicizing the communist ideological
dogma, the anti-realist tendency is one of the primary means employed by the
filmmaker to resist and propose an alternative approach to the Maoist discourse
that has dominated the previous adaptations. Without laying claim to ‘truth’
or ‘reality’, Tsui’s remake encourages a thoughtful, self-aware spectatorship
and potentially addresses the insistent and unabating yearning for heroism and
idealism.




15
  ‘Why would these exhausted soldiers in the archived photos continue to sacrifice for their
hometown and their fellow countrymen? It was […] because they had faith. I think Zirong’s faith
was most romantic. People need faith. If we don’t have it, our lives would be empty and shriveled’.
Tsui Hark, ‘I Think Yang Zirong’s Faith Was Most Romantic’, Huashang Bao <http://hsb.hsw.
cn/2014-12/27/content_8560496.htm> [accessed 6 May 2018].

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