1952 Shanghai, China

Tingyi Hu

1937

Shanghai, China

Interviewed on February 7, 2023

by Jacob Wu

(Translated from Mandarin)

I grew up in Shanghai during World War II and the transition from the nationalists to the communists. I don’t exactly recall the very first movie I watched, but it must have been one of the old pre-war movies that the communists still allowed when they came to power in 1949, like Malu Tianshi (Street Angel). I must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. We didn’t watch movies before then because of the wars and all the turmoil and upheaval, you see. My father had also started a shopkeeping business in the ’40s, so in any case our family led a very modest and spartan lifestyle in those years, and we had little time for entertainment. By the ’50s, we had much more time, so that’s probably when I saw my first movie.

Malu Tianshi was a nationalist-era movie – I think it was released in the late ’30s (1937) – but it was a movie that sympathized with the leftists and the resistance. Back then, there was a lot of corruption in China, and popular opinion was quite mixed on the nationalists who were in power. We had several different political sects, with thinkers like Hu Shih and Lu Xun, who weren’t communists but who still opposed the nationalists. Malu Tianshi was a movie shot in this vein. I don’t remember all the specific details, but I quite clearly recall that the movie reflected the entrenched inequalities in Chinese society back then. 

The theme of the movie revolves around the populace being quite poor, and the so-called wealthy and elite exploiting the common folk. In the movie, good, ordinary people are repressed to the point where they can barely eke out an existence by trying to survive on the streets, being street sweepers and so forth, and hence the movie’s name. I’m quite hazy on the specific parts of the plot – you know it’s been so many years – and I don’t think the movie had that much of a plot to start with. But if I remember correctly, there’s a girl and her sister in the story who flee the Japanese invasion up north. They land in the old districts (nongtang) in Shanghai, where they are taken in by an exploitative wealthy family and are forced to survive by performing a bunch of unpleasant services in the alleys. I believe there’s also a love story with the girl with some drama and fighting and even an escape, but unfortunately, I think it ends as a tragedy and the girl winds up dead. 

I grew up in Shanghai in this era and Malu Tianshi makes me remember that life was indeed quite difficult then. Even in the big cities, there was very little to eat in those days, mainly staples like white yams and rice and you had to wait in these long, long lines to buy anything. In the rice we ate, there was always a lot of sand and pebbles mixed in. You had to be very careful when you chewed or else you would break your teeth munching on stone! And right before the nationalists fled to Taiwan, they swapped currencies and we had all this hyperinflation. It sounds absurd, but I remember that every time my aunt received her meager salary, she would immediately go to the market and convert all of it into as many soap bars as she could to carry back. And our family was already considered fortunate. So back then, the life of the common folk could be quite bitter.

One thing I remember very well about Malu Tianshi is its music and songs. In my view the ’30s and ’40s were a golden era in Chinese film and music, and the artistic class back then wrote many beautiful and renowned musical works, even including the Chinese anthem you can hear today. So besides the very tragic plot and the political theme, I distinctly remember that there’s a number of very beautiful songs in Malu Tianshi. The female main character is played by Zhou Xuan, who was a very talented and famous actor back in those days and had such a golden, silky voice. There’s one song from the movie called The Wandering Songstress that would sometimes get played on the radio and that I would always love listening to. 

In those years, we lived in the former French district in Shanghai, so we would have gone to the movies at one of the big, Western-style theaters nearby. They were all built during the colonial years. There was a theater on Joffre Avenue which I believe was called Lanxin Juchang (Lyceum Theater) and another theater on Gordon Avenue called Meiqi Daxiyuan (Majestic Theater). I think the names of the streets and the theaters have all changed since then. 

I’d always go to the movies with my parents. You see, it would have been unsafe as a child to leave your immediate neighborhood by yourself during those years, unlike today. You could get lost or kidnapped and no one would know what to do since everything was still so chaotic. The three of us probably took a rickshaw there. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t had time to phase them out yet and I think the tram lines were still damaged from the war. On the streets outside the theater, you might have hawkers selling ice pops and the like, but once you entered the building, there was just a ticket booth before you went up some grand steps, past some curtains, and into the theater hall itself. And once you settled down, you’d be ready for the lights to dim and the movie to begin.