Yam Kim Fai - Blog Posts
Five Days of Yam-Pak Movies ～ Day 1: Madam Yun // 芸娘 (dir. Chu Kea / 珠璣, 1960) - starring Yam Kim Fai (任劍輝) and Pak Suet Sin (白雪仙)
Summary and more information under the cut!
Summary Inspired by Shen Fu/沈復's Qing Dynasty autobiography Six Records of a Floating Life/浮生六記. Madam Yun focuses on Shen Fu (Yam Kim Fai) and his wife Yun (Pak Suet Sin), who live in married bliss with their children at the former’s familial home. However, they fall foul of the machinations of Shen Fu’s younger half-brother, who has designs on the inheritance, and are summarily kicked out. The young family struggle to adjust to their poverty, but their plight is worsened by Yun becoming chronically ill; these desperate straits result in Shen Fu having to leave his family behind in search of paying work. Thankfully, after all his efforts he is able to find a benefactor, and the family is reunited under one roof (which is, sadly, not what happened in real life).
Links:
My post about Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin being queer icons
Full movie on YouTube
People have noticed! My uninformed guess is that whoever is writing these is trying to like, emulate some kind of Chinese prose style that has lots of four-character phrases/proverbial allusions or something? And is using English figures of speech as an equivalent? But I can't read or speak any kind of Chinese so I don't know if that's a real feature of Chinese prose writing. It's just a vibe I get that this is a translation of something that hit different in the source language
flipping back and forth between the document i’m editing for work and the wikipedia page for cantonese opera like a kid hiding a comic book inside their textbook