Little Women in Chinese Soap Opera, blog 2

Little Women in Chinese Soap Opera

In contemporary China, there is a big trend watching soap opera series on television and computer. In Feminism and Pop Culture, Zeisler mentioned “soap” as the kind of opera got its name from detergent companies that also created melodramas for housewives, who spent most of their time doing housework at home and have TV access mostly during the day. However, as more and more Chinese women have entered job place, Chinese soap operas modified their show time to the after-work hours from around 7pm to 10pm. Working women like it very much, because they could not only relax several hours after a whole day’s hard work, but also experience imaginational wandering about romantic love affairs that could barely happen to them in reality. What I stand is that, soap opera, usually presenting women figures to be weak, poor, pretty and compassionate, could be a distortion, which at an addictive dose, disrupts female consumers’ reasoning of what love truly is.

I will use the popular soap opera Heaven’s Wedding Gown to strengthen my point. This drama tells Cindy’s love affairs with two young men, one is a champion-winning motor cycler, the other one a successful businessman. Cindy is an ordinary working class girl who happens to win the heart of both the handsome guys. Despite her ordinariness, Cindy is weak, vulnerable to others’ contempt and dissatisfaction, and easily hurt by being misunderstood, but that is not a problem, as Cindy always has the considerate cycler by her side to offer her limitless help. So is the businessman. The setting of the three characters is so old and out-of-date that can be seen in nearly every Chinese soap opera: one beautiful woman, ambivalent in her love among two cool guys, but this kind of setting stays popular: people are just never bored of it. Soon enough, we get used to the fact that girl in soap opera achieve happiness by falling love with a handsome good-natured rich guy and finally marrying him; her own progress in job place does not matter much. In this perspective, soap operas discourage women from achieving higher career fulfillment, and unintentionally infuse into female consumers an idea that “it’s more important to marry well than to work well”.

Apart from the character setting, there is another aspect of soap opera that contributes to my point: the items setting of the scene. In most Chinese soap operas, brand cars and liquors, designer clothes, servants in big houses, famous tourist sites are frequently seen in various scenes. For instance, in the video of Cindy Wang’s Song in Heaven’s Wedding Gown, there are scenes in front of the Cathédrale Notre Dame and Triumphal Arch in Paris. Why should a Chinese story take scenes in other country? It is not only because the storyline requires that, but also the atmosphere. Romanticism of their love affairs could be better portrait if it takes place in this city. Besides, traveling abroad costs money; only the rich people have the chance. As a result, soap operas use famous foreign sites, cars, liquors, clothes and servants to suggest a material superiority of the heroes and to create an illusion of a glamorous palace which every girl aspires to live in. By doing this, soap operas inevitably fosters an ill nature of material dependence of woman on man.