JAN 24, 2023 REVISED
This became a draft for > > >Stein, Wayne. “Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage (1992): Postmodern Reflections of the Mirror in the Mirror.” in DocuFiction. See below!
Bao as the Law of Repayment
In Asian society, duplicity rules as men are allowed exceptions while women must live or die by societal rules. Ruan Ling Yu (1910-1935), the famous silent film star of early Chinese cinema, committed suicide at the age of 24 because of the gossip surrounding her affairs. Of course, Chinese male actors could easily have extra marital affairs, but a Chinese female actress, at least during the 1930’s, was supposed to remain “pure.”
The irony is that Ruan Ling Yu became famous because of her portrayal as a new modern Chinese woman, but her public still wanted the old classical Chinese woman, who remained subservient to family and the needs of men. She died perhaps as a protest and became a hungry ghost, demanding justice for the new Chinese women whom she would eventually awaken.
Suffering from guilt by association and with a larger sense of understanding bao, the masses attended her funeral in great numbers which became one of the largest in modern Chinese history. The public knew they had her blood on their sleeves as they mourned her death openly.
Her death parallels the death of other iconic figures like Rudolph Valentino, Marilyn Monroe or Bruce Lee. “These figures become ghosts, reborn into our imaginative tales, transformed within a multitude of articles, short stories, books, plays, and films which continue to haunt the public’s imagination” (Stein 216).
As we thirst for their talent or blood, we suck their creative energies dry. With our own sense of bao, we are like fox spirits in our lust to become immortal while trying to justify their sacrifice to our cult of personality and while making our fallen icons bigger than life.
Understanding the code of bao becomes an important part of Asian ghost tales.
Bao remains an important concept about the idea of social equity system that is eternal in its scope. Nothing is free. If someone helps you, you have to help them back. If someone harms you, repayment is part of the code of bao.
Thus, if your sense of justice has been betrayed when alive in this world, you have a chance for redemption later in death. Tales of ghosts demanding justice are quite common in Chinese society and in Asian society in general.
Their sense of entitlement to bao motivates ghosts into action. “One of the central organizing concepts of the Chinese imaginary cosmos is boa, repayment or retribution, which may take the form of either heavenly or personal repayment of past good and evil deeds” (Huntington 1).
Perhaps one of the reasons hungry ghosts and fox tales are usually women is that women in Chinese society pay the highest price for being subjugated or oppressed by the Confucian patriarchal system that sacrifices their rights.
–Doc Nirvana
AKA Dr. Wayne Stein
Work Cited
Kao, Karl S Y. “‘Bao’ and ‘Baoying’: Narrative Causality and External Motivations in Chinese Fiction” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews; Dec 1, 1989; 11, Periodicals Archive Online pgs. 115 -138.
Stein, Wayne. “Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage (1992): Postmodern Reflections of the Mirror in the Mirror.” Docufictions. Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2006. 216-229. Mentioned in: http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Mise-en-Scene%20Crime/10.pdf
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