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Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka (directors), Stonewalling, 2022. 148 min.

The first time she wears the t-shirt she paces before a mirror practicing a tongue twister. “Forty is forty. Fourteen is fourteen. They’re not the same,” she struggles to say in Mandarin, a language which she, for someone from Hunan province and whose mother tongue is Xiang, supposedly needs to master if she wants so-called better opportunities for herself, such as becoming a flight attendant, or a suit-shop employee, or the girlfriend of an aspiring entrepreneur who thinks he knows what’s best for her. When she’s with him, she’s a second-class citizen, whether it’s at the end of a long dinner table, or off to the side in a photo shoot, trying to be someone she’s not: the perfect victim. He’s standing there, beside her, adjusting his tie and correcting her mistakes, more of a parental figure than a partner, this young man with dreams of travelling to foreign lands and leaving behind the world he was born into, where one merely rots.

The second time she wears the t-shirt—it is white, with text printed on it—is on a visit to Ms Qing: the manager of an underground operation that shops young Chinese women for egg donation and Uyghur women for surrogacy. The clients are typically upper-middle-class overseas returnees. She—her name is Lyn, and she is played Yao Hong-Qui, who gives a subtly powerful and gracefully corporeal performance—walks around the extravagantly decorated room: there are chandeliers and silk curtains, paintings against damask wallpaper. She finds herself an observer of the scene, as if in a rehearsal for a murder, sending lambs to the slaughter: a client interviewing potential candidates personal with invasive questions, objectifying their bone structure. Whether or not Lyn wants to be on the other side of the threshold, as a participant, remains to be seen, since her interest can mainly be attributed to the promise of 20,000 yuan, enough to help pay her mother’s debt. But her dreams are dashed when she learns that she’s currently pregnant—and the title of the film—Stonewalling—starts to make some sense.

Her mother used to run an alternative medicine clinic and was accused of causing a stillbirth, compensation for which she pays in monthly instalments from the profits she makes as part of a pyramid scheme whose main product is Vital Cream. The cream is said to remove varicose veins and is made with 28 herbs and quantum technology. It is next to her mother that Lyn sits the third time she wears the white t-shirt with text printed on it, in the kindergarten room facing the boss. Lyn plays her ex-boyfriend’s voice messages to him, pausing to translate it from Xiang to Mandarin—her advanced language skills suddenly proving useful for once. He is under the impression that she’d had an abortion, meaning that he won’t cause any trouble to their arrangement—which is what? They’ve hatched a plan: a daughter with an unwanted pregnancy; and her mother paying off debt due to a terminated pregnancy: the baby a possible solution to absolving everyone of their responsibilities and restoring the absence at the centre of the story.

Then there’s a twist: the boss agrees only if the baby is physically and mentally perfect.

It is only on the fourth appearance of the white t-shirt, as Lyn strolls through the children’s section of a store looking for a gift, that the text on it starts to resonate. FEMME FATALE, it reads. Lynn doesn’t immediately strike one, as the dictionary has it, as a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations; no, no, no, not that: but as a woman who—as the feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane puts it in Femme Fatales—“never really is what she seems to be” and “harbours a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable”, she certainly begins to seem so. Lyn goes about her daily life, helping her parents manage their business, declining to take a sample sanitary pad since she won’t be needing it for the time being, improving her diet, and working for Ms Qing babysitting donor candidates. She carries several secrets around with her—concealing them from her father, and also the father of the child, until much later. This radically charges all her experiences, which exist on two planes of reality, priming us for dramatic irony. She descends only to suddenly ascend.

The pattern breaks: she stops wearing the t-shirt, outgrows it. The seasons change and she wears knitted sweaters devoid of significations. We watch her cycle through states of shame, bewilderment, embarrassment, ambivalence, confidence, and regret, watch her waddle, hold onto her lower back, find out how much money she owes her ex-boyfriend for the English classes she never cared about to begin with. At one point she is told that she is naive, as though it were an offence rather than one of her assets. She commits herself to a high-stakes plot that she has found herself, further implicating herself, a plot that is both insane and yet entirely plausible. She seeks to avenge her mother and free herself from the shackles of filial piety, turning her predicament into her power, taking full advantage of it. Her body becomes a symbol of optimism, for, other than the birthing scene, she manages to keep her emotions under control, never needing to explode, advancing confidently, believing she’s doing the right thing.

In the end, Lyn massages the pain in her breasts that has existed from the beginning of the film, around when her mother told her: “It’s not that easy, girl. Even if you send the baby away, when you hear him cry, when he is born, a bond is formed. Your breasts will hurt more than now. And you will never let go of that feeling, it will always remain in your heart.” Those words come back to haunt her as the baby, not shown but heard, screams and screams. Lyn pounds her chest to ease the pain. One decision could change your life, but did you choose it or did it choose you? Sometimes you realise nothing has gone the way you envisioned it. A failure, and a success. There are only two ways out of this mess: to go abroad or keep using that Vital Cream. After the age of passion, comes the age of enterprise, of not-so trivial pursuits.

How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “Femme Fatale: On Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/29/stonewalling.

Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a writer at the intersection of literature and film from Toronto, Canada. He holds a BA. in English Literature from York University and his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Centifictionist, TamilCulture and paloma magazine. He runs Shortcuts, his weekly flash fiction substack, and is currently at work on a novel about the anxiety of waiting.

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