Was Cheng purposefully mixing up the gender pro nouns, thus garnering more beatings from his caretakers?
On that note, was it customary in China for men to portray female characters?
The movie was vastly interesting, not simply plotwise but as a look into Chinese history. Loved it...
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and I don't have a solid answer for it. If I recall, even in the book, it's not that clear if Xiao Douzi was intentionally flubbing the line or if it were an honest mistake. When I first saw the film (before reading the book), I was certain that Douzi had done this intentionally, because he was unwilling to call himself a girl, even in the context of the play. It's hard to imagine that he could accidently flub the line that many times. I'm not really sure whether or not it was supposed to be intentional or not and I think maybe both the author of the book and the director of the film wanted to leave that up to interpretation. I may need to crack the book open again to be certain, though. It's been a while since I sat down and read it and I could be forgetting something.
But yes, it was customary for men to play the female roles at that time because females were not allowed on stage. If you recall, toward the end of the film there is a scene where Cheng Dieyi and Xiaolou are speaking to a group of Opera students, some of whom are female. Remember that Dieyi insulted their 'new' form of Opera because it wasn't Opera in it's true form, in his opinion. The character of Cheng Dieyi was actually based off an actual Dan (male who played female lead on stage) by the name of Mei Lanfang. The details of the story are not based on Lanfang but he was definitely the inspiration behind Leslie's portrayal and who Kaige Chen had in mind when invisioning Cheng Dieyi on film.
There is also a biopic in the works about Mei Lanfang's actual life and Kaige Chen will also be directing, so I'm REALLY excited about it. It's listed on imdb but for now it's only written up as, "Untitled Mei Lanfang project."
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It is actually VERY possible that Douzi could flub his lines that much over and over again. Chinese classical poetry is difficult stuff. And you can tell by the look on his face that he really isn't doing it on purpose.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106332/board/nest/28696999?p=1
It's a link to the thread I started about this not long after seeing the film for the first few times. I thought I'd started a thread about this and gotten a solid explanation for the flub but I had to do a little searching to find it. Sadly, one of the posts on the thread has been deleted but if you read the second to last post on it, I think that poster gave a very good explanation about the error and also related it to Dieyi messing up the line again, all those years later. (Just before he killed himself.)
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