If you are a man who believes yourself to be straight, but one day find that you are falling in love with another man who happens to be the man of your dreams, what would you do? Would you convince yourself that gender is not important or would you choose to end the relationship? This is the decision the actor Gu needs to make in the movie “He's a Woman, She's a Man.”
The story happened in the 1990s in Hong Kong, a new era of pop stars in China. An ordinary girl named Lin was crazy about a famous music star, Gu. When an entertainment company, which Gu was in, held a talent show to find the pop male star of the future, Lin decided to sign up under the disguise of being a man. There is no story without coincidence. Lin became the winner of the show beyond everyone’s expectation and attracted Gu’s attention by the virtue of sincerity and kindness. When Gu finally found he was falling in love with Lin, who he thought was a man, he was astonished. He gave himself over to grief because following his heart meant accepting himself as a gay, but lying to himself that he didn’t love Lin meant betraying his heart. In the end, Gu exhibited an enormous amount of grit and prepared to accept his new sexual orientation so that he confessed his feeling to Lin, but then Lin told him the truth that she was actually a woman. The comedy winds up with a happy ending as usual that all will be well.
The movie is famous in China not only because its vision of love is ahead of its time, but also due to the actor who played Gu, Leslie Cheung. Cheung was the most welcomed and greatest star in China during the last decades of the twentieth century, and he was a gay. He came out publicly by his speech to his lover on one of the 1997 series concerts, which was a year Mainland China still viewed homosexuality as a mental disease. Cheung had a high profile overseas for his splendid, vivid performance in the homosexual movie "Farewell My Concubine." It is said that the famous sentence in the movie, “Whatever you are a man or a woman, the only thing I know is that I love you,” was added because of his willingness to express that attitude towards love. A woman pretended to be a man and fell in love with a man who mistakenly thought himself gay, the whole gender reversal not only made the audience laugh but also left questions for people to think about like: Can gender change our love? Who are we really falling in love with? Do we fall in love with someone’s characteristics, or do we fall in love with their gender?
I believe the answer is the first one. Gender is irrelevant with love just like other factors, such as money and age. I don’t deny that appearance, money, tastes and other extras are benchmarks when we consider accepting a man or a woman as our lover. However, what really flips our hearts is the man or woman him or herself. When we were born, we couldn’t choose our gender before we have consciousness so how can we tell the gender difference between two souls? It is our body that restricts us to be a man or woman. In an advertisement for Always tampons, named #LikeAGirl, different men were asked to behave like a girl, and they all acted exaggerated primping and emotional. When the same proposition was put to the girls, they just did what normal people would do without "sissy" actions that the men affected. The comparison showed that bias was groundless and there were no essential differences between genders.
Furthermore, is it necessary that everyone must belong to one gender or another? I don’t think so, as everyone has different characteristics and sides. For example, a man can be sentimental when he is moved by a love story and a woman also can be tough when her children are in great danger. What really limits us are societal expectations, not biological gender.
