To Eat and Be Eaten: A Productively Perverse Reading of Li Pik-Wah’s Dumplings

by: Danielle Seid , February 6, 2024

Adapted for the screen by Hong Kong writer Li Pik-wah (Lillian Lee), one of Hong Kong’s most prolific and acclaimed novelists and screenwriters, Gau ji/Dumplings (2004) is a peculiar horror film, more quietly disgusting than terrifying. The premise of Dumplings is simple: a middle-aged TV actress, Mrs. Li, whose husband keeps his young mistress in a hotel room nearby, seeks out an infamous dumpling maker, Auntie Mei, to help her recapture her youthful beauty and husband’s attention. Auntie Mei offers Mrs. Li an elixir in the form of handmade dumplings made with a special ingredient that she procures at a nearby hospital: human foetuses.

Arguably the most well-known Hong Kong horror film written by a woman, Dumplings represents one iteration of Li’s horror film collaboration with Hong Kong New Wave director Fruit Chan, with whom Li produced a short film version of Dumplings (2004) and six ‘portmanteau’ horror films based on her short stories for Mai lei yeh/Tales from the Dark 1 (2013) and Kei yau yeh/Tales from the Dark 2 (2013). Despite Li’s significant contributions to Hong Kong cinema and the fact that she is in her own words ‘even more notorious’ (quoted in Chua 2019) than some of the male directors working in the Hong Kong and Chinese film industries, Li remains largely under-examined in Hong Kong cinema and Hong Kong horror film scholarship.

Over her decades-long career, Li has written screenplays for numerous popular and critically lauded films that span genres, including historical drama (Ba wang bie ji/Farewell My Concubine,1993; Chuen Do Fong Ji/Kawashima Yoshiko: The Last Princess of Manchuria, 1990; Qin yong/A Terra-Cotta Warrior, 1989), ghost story (Yim ji kau/Rouge, 1987), fantasy (Ching se/Green Snake, 1993), and wuxia/martial arts (You Seng/Temptation of a Monk, 1993). Across Li’s novels and screenplays, women and femmes find themselves caught in the crosshairs of empire, emerging nation-states, and heteropatriarchy. Li’s femme characters are subjects-in-struggle shaped by historical and political forces; they are resourceful subjects that weaponize their femme beauty to survive and get ahead, but they do so assuming the risks and toll it takes to be ‘bad women’. Li has said that she is ‘particularly interested in the psychology of bad women’ and that ‘to be bad is not an easy thing’ (quoted in Chua 2019).

Dumplings exemplifies Li’s preoccupation with the mashup of traditional Chinese culture, modern society, and complex female and femme subjects. An erotically charged film, Dumplings engages all three of the body genres that Linda Williams famously theorizes in her essay ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’ (1991)—horror, pornography, and melodrama. We watch the film’s subjects as they both desire to eat and are eaten by desire. The film places us, uncomfortably, at the scene of cannibalistic consumption (Stokes 2018: 177), and we too may want to eat the delectable dumplings. Fruit Chan says, ‘the film is related to popular beliefs in South China [where] … people started to eat embryos a long time ago… in real life it really does exist’ (Director Commentary, Three Extremes, 2004). Chan’s comments about the film leave a bad taste in my mouth: for me, his insistence on the ‘reality’ that Chinese women do in fact eat human foetuses risks demonising Chinese and other East Asian women as pathologically vain and obsessed with feminine beauty. As such, in this video essay, I set out to explore the film’s femme subjects and aesthetics as a response both to Fruit Chan’s comments as well as the absence of attention to Li’s contributions to Hong Kong horror in Hong Kong film scholarship. Given the struggles that take place in the collaborative process of making a film (a process about which Li speaks openly), I aim to interrogate how Li’s cultural and narrative preoccupations as a screenwriter relate to and are in tension with the film’s formal qualities, such as the cinematography and performances. What, I ask: does the film’s perverse eating tell us about ‘bad’ Chinese femme subjects (who, if we listen to Li’s comments about the femme characters across her oeuvre, are ‘bad because of the men they meet’)?

Throughout the film, cinematographer Christopher Doyle repeatedly frames the film’s Chinese femme stars in close-up shots that invite us to ‘taste’ their feminine beauty. To help think through the aesthetics of Dumplings’ Chinese femme film performers, I draw upon Mila Zuo’s recently published monograph Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (2022). In Vulgar Beauty, Zuo develops an aesthetic theory that relies on a system of taste—namely, the taste of Chinese-ness on screen. Zuo ponders why Chinese femme film performers on screen consistently ‘slide into objectness’ (2022: 10), and why and how they are rendered vulgar because of their proximity to animals, objects, spirits, and food. Such performers on screen activate aesthetic shocks, Zuo argues, that align with the tastes of bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour. In her chapter on Bai Ling’s ‘pungent’ stardom (Zuo does not analyze Dumplings), Zuo unpacks the racialized and gendered implications of the term hot mess (2022: 122). In Dumplings, both Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) and Auntie Mei (Bai Ling) are, it would seem, a hot mess, a phrase with roots in colonial-era plantation economies; their beauty is ‘breathtaking, perforating our mundane rhythms’ (Zuo 2022: 11). Dumplings’ porny and sometimes melodramatic body horror serves as a vehicle to ‘taste’ the possibilities for brazen femmes and bad women.

Under heteropatriarchy and colonial regimes, the stakes are high for femme people. Chinese and other Asian femmes are subject to gazes that are objectifying, sexualising, and exoticising. I dedicate this video essay to brazen femmes everywhere that, as Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri write, are ‘a mirror reflecting back fatal illusions’ (2002: 12).