When Hong Kong movie director Cheung Yuen-ting finished her latest film, a historical tale of three Chinese women, she was amazed to find China's government censors firmly waving shiny scissors under her nose."They cut two major scenes that did a lot of harm to the balance of the picture," Cheung fretted in a recent interview from behind blue-tinted glasses.
Her film, a Hong Kong production made in China, tackles the lives and loves of three sisters from China's prominent Soong family, set against the tumult of a bloody civil war and Japan's invasion of China during the first half of the 20th century.
"I tried to look at history from a human perspective," Cheung said, adding she wanted to show the sadness of a close family breaking apart when the two younger sisters married men of opposing ideologies.
The middle sister, Soong Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China. Youngest sister Mei-ling wedded Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader whose government was driven from the mainland to Taiwan by communist forces. The eldest sister, Ai-ling, married wealthy financier H.H. Kung.
Any movie made in China about famous Chinese personalities needs approval for the script and the released version from an official film bureau. This bureau ordered the cuts.
"The Soong Sisters," filmed in lush, poetic frames, comes across to audiences as a story about little girls who grow up to face immense personal loss.
In researching her film, Cheung scoured New York library archives for clues to Mei-ling, who wrote long, flowing letters in perfect English to her American friends about the general she loved.
"She said he has the power and the charisma of a military man but the charm and tenderness of a poet," Cheung related.
Mei-ling told her friends about how Chiang picked delicate plum blossoms from the mountains and hid them until dinner time to present to her as a surprise in a reed basket.
Much to her chagrin, Cheung discovered that China is terribly particular about how its national enemies are depicted.
"The censors did not like me to make Chiang Kai-shek too much of a human with thoughts and feelings and a personal life, so by trying to make Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling three-dimensional they already found it difficult to accept," she said.
As depicted by Cheung, Mei-ling played a central role in Chiang's policy shift in the Chinese city of Xian during the chilly winter of 1936, when he finally formed a pact with the communists to fight the Japanese.
That scene, showing Mei-ling in a bright red cheongsam facing dour warlords dressed in black and arguing passionately for a nationalist-communist alliance, was snipped out. "Vivian Wu gave the best performance in the entire movie in that scene," Cheung said unhappily.
In all, Chinese government censors sliced about 18 minutes from the film, mainly parts showing Chiang Kai-shek and Mei-ling. The censors slashed 10 crucial minutes off the ending, the most painful cut for Cheung.
In it, sisters Mei-ling and Ching-ling visit an army camp to present a united front, symbolic of the nationalist-communist pact against Japan.
In a sweeping chase, the sisters are attacked by strafing Japanese bombers. They escape, their plane catches fire and they jump together from the aircraft with the last available parachute, clinging to each other accompanied by a lilting musical score by composer Kitaro.
"I've been trying to think what was wrong with this ending. Some said that it's not true, it never happened, but many of the things in my film never happened," says Cheung.
During the parachute jump, the film flashes back to the past and leaps forward into the future, showing in a brief documentary what happened to China and Taiwan.
"I used computer graphics to generate Chiang Kai-shek with the crowds retreating to Taiwan," Cheung explained.
She noted with regret the trouble she went to and the money she spent to perfect the special effects.
"It's all gone." She lets out her breath in a low, incredulous whistle.
The cuts in her film puzzled Cheung because her original script had been approved in 1993. By the time the film was completed in 1995, the personnel at the film bureau had changed.
"The new head of the film bureau came and they already were quite shocked to find this film has been made and they asked why such a film was approved in the first place," Cheung said.
Oddly enough, after numerous trips to Beijing to appeal the decisions on the cuts, Cheung befriended the censors.
"They told me they thought they were the best scenes in the entire picture, but they had to do it because it was their policy," Cheung said.