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In February 1933, the Shanghai movie magazine The Star Daily ran a poll asking readers to name the “Queen of Chinese Cinema.” The winner, in a landslide victory of 21,344 votes, was the nation’s highest paid screen performer, Hu Die, 1 who starred in an approximate ninety movies over a span of forty-four years. Of those ninety titles, the vast majority are either lost or languish in obscurity. 10,028 votes went to Chen Yumei, roughly a year before the starlet married her boss at Tianyi Film Company and vanished from cinema screens. 2 Her films, too, have been largely forgotten. The third-place winner of this poll (with 7,290 votes) lived a shorter life and made fewer films than those preceding her, and yet has been immortalized as an international film icon. Of all the stars of Chinese silent cinema, Ruan Lingyu remains one of the most well-known decades later; the subject of numerous studies, documentaries, and dramatic reconstructions (including two television miniseries and a 1991 biopic directed by Stanley Kwan).
Debate persists as to how much of Ruan’s lasting popularity can be attributed to the fact that she committed suicide at the age of twenty-four. Around midnight on March 7, 1935 – after a long period of legal battles and being slandered in the press – the actress poured three bottles of sleeping pills into a bowl of congee, poisoning herself, and died in a hospital the following day. Her body lay in state in the Wanguo Funeral Home for nearly a week, observed by a crowd greater than that which had attended the wedding of Hu Die just eight months earlier. When the funeral procession began on March 14, an estimated 100,000 watched her casket being transported to Luen Yee Sayzoong Cemetery. A few admirers honored the late movie star by taking their own lives. (“If Ruan Lingyu is dead, what else is there to live for?” proclaimed one heartbroken follower. [Ling 133]) And in May of that year, the essayist Lu Xun published one of his most famous pieces, “Gossip Is a Fearful Thing,” named after a line in what was purported to have been one of Ruan’s suicide notes. 3
Nearly four decades later, film historian Jay Leyda wrote in his 1972...