ABSTRACT
The much anticipated film version of Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel Memoirs of a Geisha arrived tailing a flurry of controversy. Critics and viewers in Japan, China, and the United States criticized director Rob Marshall and producer Steven Spielberg’s decision to shoot the film in English and furthermore to have three Chinese actresses play the lead roles of geisha. The official response to these criticisms, voiced by the film’s Japanese stars themselves, is that Japan does not have any female actresses with the star power or international box-office pull of any of the film’s three Chinese lead actresses: Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, and Michelle Yeoh. As to shooting the film in English, this seemed not so much a choice as an expectation, in return for the film’s US$80 million budget. This chapter aims to focus these criticisms and expectations on the wider phenomenon of female stars who previously worked solely in Chinese-language cinemas now taking on English-speaking roles in America. While the employment of foreign actresses in Hollywood is nothing new, it is arguable that the recent crossover of Chinese actresses into English-language cinematic industries represents a new period of modernity for representations of Chinese femininity. Chinese femininity in the period of the 1990s and beyond is being redefined cinematically. But what is at stake in these new visual manifestations enabled by the crossover? How can we read this “translingual stardom,” to adapt a term of Lydia Liu’s, to regard its wider implications for cross-cultural politics?
