She was the star of Girl in Disguise (1936), a huge box office hit that spawned three sequels. One of Chinese cinema’s earliest gender-benders, it epitomized the “soft films” of 1930s Shanghai that were despised by ideologues—both left and right.
the imperial chinese examinations are a godsend for enjoyers of pathetic historical men such as myself. they gave rise to so many types of guy, such as: guy who failed the examinations like forty times and despondently wrote one of the great works of chinese literature between failures; guy who failed like ten times and decided “you know what? this is bullshit. this all has to go” and started a brutal peasant uprising; guy who just barely passed and was suddenly thrown into a very high military position, which he has ABSOLUTELY no training for; and guy who failed several times, faked a degree, got hired by harvard to teach chinese, had his fake degree discovered after he got to boston, begged harvard to let him teach because otherwise it would be really embarrassing for them all, taught like seven students, and died of pneumonia
These emotional breakdowns provoked some of the funniest Chinese classical lit
