To be a woman is to be in a world that understands you as other; the mere act of being thus becomes a struggle against the ubiquitous norms found in the very roots of collective social life. Take, for example, the everyday and seemingly neutral act of language. The Chinese character for good (好, pronounced ‘hao’) combines the characters for woman (女, pronounced ‘nu’) and child (子, produced ‘zi’), and is said to nod to the notion that it is good for a woman to bear a child. Other characters containing the sign for ‘woman’ – 女 – are slightly less wholesome, if still continuing the reductive approach to the social uses and iterations of womanhood. Jealousy (妒); greedy (婪); prostitute (妓) and rape (奸) all feature the female nu. The character jian 姦, most of all, brings together three signs for ‘woman’ , 女, all in one. Jian’s various usages range from signifying wanton evil, treachery and betrayal, to illicit sexual affairs depending on the context – but what stays the same is the implicit, perverse threat posed by the unwavering feminine ‘nu’.
Girls Always Happy (Rou qing shi) is director Yang Mingming’s debut feature, and saw its world premiere at this year’s 68th Berlinale. The film examines the personal and professional trials of mother-daughter duo, the recent university graduate Wu (played by Yang herself) and her down-on-her-luck mother, who remains unnamed (Nai An). The pair live in one of Beijing’s modern-day hutongs – a historic Chinese residential system marked by twisting alleyways and small one-story homes – and are both struggling writers constantly on the brink of financial ruin. “You graduated two years ago. Do you even have a job?” the mother snaps to Wu, who fires back citing her mother’s own financial duress and lack of meaningful relationships. Their rhetorical battles, threaded with mutual pettiness, hatred, competition and sorrow, echo the negative female relationships inscribed in jian (姦). “You were going to marry me off and get rid of me!” shouts Wu to her mother in another one of their relentless rows.
Frustrated and tired of each other, Wu and her mother both turn to the most ordinary escapism: romantic flings with men. Wu is in a relationship with older film studies professor Xian Zhang (Xianming Zhan) – “Is she your student?” a female faculty member asks Zhang – while her mother finds new life with the former husband of an acquaintance. Their precarious dependence on the men in their lives is not only emotional, but material. As a writer, Wu struggles to find financial backing for her screenplays and she often depends on funds doled out by Xian Zhang, while enjoying the perks of his cushy, middle-class life. In other scenes, the mother-daughter duo work hard to ingratiate themselves with Wu’s grandfather, in the hope that he will write them into his will.
Reflecting on the origins of their financial ruin, Wu’s mother ruefully observes “If I had a man to consult back then, things would be different”. In the world of Girls Always Happy, men are the gatekeepers and facilitators of material wealth; it is they who are active agents of the world, leaving the women to scramble for their affection. It is in the interest of the hegemonic, masculine subject, after all, to ensure that relations between women remain petty, competitive and self-defeating. Wu’s mother’s status as a middle-aged divorcee serves as a foil to Wu and her youthful beauty. In a society that has a marked contempt for older women, life is lonely for Wu’s mother: she cries face-down in her mattress because she feels that she has “no connection to this world”. And yet Wu also learns that boyfriends can never save you from yourself. Trapped in a society that writes an impossible script for women – be beautiful, but not vain; smart, but pretend you don’t know it; less economically successful than the man in your life, but not to the point of desperation – Wu and her mother become increasingly tangled in the mutual contradictions of ‘ideal womanhood’, stuck in an impossible game in which the winners are always men and the losers, other women – and eventually themselves. “Here’s my opinion of men”, Wu’s mother reflects in one of her many scene-stealing speeches, “one word: disgusting”.
Girls Always Happy offers a searing and unapologetic look into how women are habitually positioned into mutually contradictory roles, and how their resultant emotional, material, and even existential dependence on men – acutely felt in modern China – place them in constant competition amongst other women in a way that can engender pettiness, smallness, and jealousy. We witness the paradoxical set-up of a social system that tells women to value male approval above all else and then calls them greedy, evil and jealous for trying to succeed in a world that does not allow any additional routes to greatness; “the ruling caste”, Simone de Beauvoir notes in 1949 in her landmark The Second Sex, has a tendency to “base its argument [about the inferiority of others] on the state of affairs it created itself.”
And yet, nothing strikes fear into the heart of the patriarchy like female relationships that escape the limited model of palatable, non-threatening womanhood. When Wu ends her relationship with Zhang, she anticipates that her mother’s first concern will be the recent lack of funds and preemptively asserts “I won’t let you starve”. But her mother tells her that she does not care about the money: she just wants to know if Zhang treated her well. Though wholly happy moments in Girls Always Happy are, ironically, few and far-between, the film documents how its characters find joy in their respective female friendships, in which tales of heartbreak, professional success, and the tactile strength of stockings are discussed over hearty broths, puddings and hair conditioning kits. Forget about men – Girls Always Happy illuminates in brilliant and heart-wrenching splendour that the true antidote to grinding misery imposed from above is a warm, infinite generosity sustained from below. “The only debt that can’t be repaid in this world is a mother’s love!” shouts Wu’s mother, in a particularly heated moment of bickering. Righteous anger aside, she does have a point.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review and staff writer at Another Gaze. She tweets at @becbecliuliu.
