Doubled Lives, Dissimulated History: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Good Men, Good Women (Critical Essay‪)‬

Themes of multiple identity and uncanny repetition pervade contemporary Chinese-language cinema. While the strategy of doubling can take many forms, from doppelgangers to split personalities to sci-fi replicants, these films demonstrate a shared fascination with the idea of a single body inhabited by dual identities, conveyed through the use of a single actor to represent plural characters. To name some examples, Center Stage (Hong Kong, 1991) presents Maggie Cheung in her role as the Chinese silent film star Ruan Ling-yu but also as herself, discussing her character with director Stanley Kwan, a strategy that functions as a meditation on film history and the mirroring of art and life. Two recent mainland productions, Wang Quan'an's Lunar Eclipse (1999) and Lou Ye's Suzhou River (2000), feature mysterious twins--who may or may not be the same person--two stories, one woman, or perhaps one story, two women, as Lunar Eclipse's publicity poster reads (Zhang 9). A similar use of the double is found in Good Men, Good Women, a 1995 film from Taiwan directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien that presents one woman in two stories divided between different eras. In it, Annie Shizuka Inoh plays both a character based upon a living person and one that is an entirely fictional persona. With this distinction in their status, the axis plotted out by their duality shifts from the interior realm of a "self-commenting, self-combative, doubled but estranged consciousness" (Schwartz, 87) to the external realm of discourse, where a "real" history encounters its narrative representation. The first of these characters is Chiang Bi-yu, recognizable to domestic audiences as a political figure whose recently published memoirs provide the source material for Good Men, Good Women's screenplay. The portion of her life covered by the film begins in 1940 during the Sino-Japanese war when she leaves Taiwan, at the time a colony of Japan, and travels to the mainland with her husband, Chung Hao-tung, in order to enlist in the Chinese resistance. With the defeat of Japan and the turnover of Taiwan to Chinese administration in 1945, the couple returns to the island and continues their political activities. Shortly thereafter, however, the country's leadership is split apart by civil war; the Nationalist regime, defeated by Mao's communist forces on the mainland, retreats to Taiwan and reestablishes its rule there as the Republic of China. In the wake of a series of conflicts between the transplanted regime and the island's longtime inhabitants that nearly results in another civil war, the Nationalists implement a brutal crackdown on political dissent, one that continues through following decade. During this period, known as the "White Terror," Chiang Bi-yu and Chung Hao-tung are placed under arrest, the latter ultimately executed by the state. (1) A dedication at the end of the film highlights this historical context: "Dedicated to Chung Hao-tung and Chiang Bi-yu and all the political victims of the 1950s."