1948 Shanghai, China
Sun Jinxiang
1936
Shanghai, China
Interviewed on February 7, 2021
by Vivian Wang
Growing up, my mother often worked long hours—from six in the morning to eleven at night. During the little time that she had off from work, she’d bring me along to roam the city. Like moths to a flame, we always found ourselves drawn to the cinema. The first movie I remember seeing was Return on a Snowy Night 《风雪夜归人》(1948) written and directed by Wu Zuguang. I must have been around twelve years old. My mother came home early one evening and I noticed that she was in a particularly cheerful mood. She told me to quickly finish my dinner and put on a pair of shoes. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, only that it was a surprise. We walked for what felt like miles through Huangpu District until we finally arrived at the Shanghai Cathay Theatre. When we arrived, there were ushers who led us to a couple of empty seats. They didn’t have concession stands back in those days, so we had filled our pockets beforehand with oranges and small chocolate candies to snack on. The anticipation lingering in the air as we waited for the film to begin mingled with the sweet smell of citrus and cocoa.
While the details of the movie itself have now blurred in my memory, the pain of forbidden love is still sharp in my heart. I recall a Peking Opera actor named Liansheng falling in love with Yuchun, the concubine of a high-ranking official. Despite being well-known and popular among dignitaries, Liansheng was unhappy performing for the sake of entertaining others. The pair met while Yuchun was studying opera and mutual misery brought them together. They both yearned for independence, so they planned to elope. I vividly remember Liansheng giving Yuchun a Chinese crabapple blossom as a symbol of his love. Sadly, the official discovered their secret and sent his men to prevent his concubine from fleeing. Liansheng was driven out of his hometown and did not return until twenty years later. By the time he came back, he no longer recognized the place. Ill and impoverished, Liansheng died on that snowy night without ever reuniting with Yuchun.
There were many things that I was too young to understand at the time. Why was Liansheng unhappy if he was so successful? Why could two people not be together even if they loved one another? These were questions I asked my mother on our walk back from the theater. She must have laughed at my naïveté. “Children’s minds are always so simple,” she’d often say. From that night on, we went to the movies nearly every other week. Since my family could no longer afford to send me to school, I spent much of my free time at the theater with my friends. While I was actually privileged enough to receive a fair amount of schooling compared to other girls my age, I often noticed that my mother was struggling to read the subtitles of the films we saw together. I remember turning to look up at her and seeing her brows furrowed as she stared at the screen intently. Looking back, I cherish those times with her. I learned more about my mother through seeing her reactions to the action onscreen than I ever could through simply talking to her. Since then, I have always believed that films have the power to bridge the gap between generations. Fifty years later, our family moved to Rochester, New York. When we arrived at our new house, the first thing I noticed was the crabapple tree. Pale pink blossoms, which decorated the tree’s outstretched arms, greeted us brightly. My heart ached as my mind retraced the story of Liansheng and Yuchun. You were born a few years after we moved in. As I held you in my arms for the first time the day you were brought back from the hospital, I looked out at the world blanketed in snow and I knew that this was home.
