Queer pop culture in the Sinophone mediaspherethis narrative. These include, among many others, mainland Chinese author Liu Suola’s novella,
“Blue Sky Green Sea” (1985); Hong Kong author Wong Bikwan’s story “She’s A Young Woman
and So Am I” (1994); two made-for-TV films from Taiwan, Tsao Jui-yuan’s The Maidens’ Dance
(based on Cao Lijuan’s 1991 short story) and Lisa Chen Xiuyu’s Voice of Waves (both 2002); Yan
Yan Mak’s film Butterfly (Hong Kong, 2004); and Zero Chou’s film Spider Lilies (Taiwan, 2007).^4
In the context of this chapter, it is interesting to observe the trans-Asian genealogy of this
popular narrative of schoolgirl romance. As Tze-lan D. Sang has shown, the concept of tongxing’ai
(同性愛: homosexuality) first entered modern Chinese in the 1920s via the Japanese translation
of a European sexological term, doseiai (Sang 2003, 102–103). The coinage of the Japanese doseiai
in the opening decades of the twentieth century was strongly linked with contemporaneous
attempts to describe romantic friendships between female students in modern educational insti-
tutions (Pflugfelder 2008). The Chinese schoolgirl romance stories of the 1920s and 1930s show
that this conceptual association between the two novel concepts of shōjo (少女: girls) and doseiai
in the Japanese transculturation of European sexology was in turn translated into the Chinese
context (Sang 2003, 127–160; Martin 2010, 29–48).^5
The schoolgirl romance narrative’s contemporary manifestations, too, are marked by trans-
national resonances. A parallel preoccupation with black and white school uniforms, campus
settings, and girlish homoeroticism is found, for example, in a spate of Japanese and Korean
girls’-school horror movies that have circulated across East Asia’s Sinophone societies as part
of the Japanese and Korean pop culture waves. Notable examples include the Eko eko azarak
films from Japan (Wizard of Darkness, 1995, and Birth of the Wizard, 1996, both dir. Shimako
Sato), and the Yeogo goedam trilogy from Korea (Whispering Corridors, 1998, dir. Ki-hyung Park;
Memento Mori, 1999, dir. Tae-yong Kim and Kyu-dong Min; The Wishing Stairs, 2003, dir.
Jae-yeon Yun). The shadow of the Chinese-style schoolgirl romance narrative is clearly apparent
in the cover text of the DVD release of the Korean film, Memento Mori, by Hong Kong’s Mei
Ah Entertainment Group. The DVD cover features images of two schoolgirls, uniformed in the
familiar Japanese-style white shirts and black skirts, against a deep blue, underwater background.
The Chinese text at the cover’s left hand side stitches the Korean film firmly into the Chinese-
language discourse of memorialized schoolgirl love: “In the past, you and I were so very close—
today, surely you’ll remember me?” Leaving aside the question of how Memento Mori’s memorial
narrative of schoolgirl love may relate to Korean discourses on same-sex sexuality—a question
beyond the scope of this chapter—it is clear from the Hong Kong framing of the film for
regional Chinese audiences that this Korean film was readily fitted into the pre-existent discur-
sive framework on adolescence, memory, and love between schoolgirls.
Although the classic form of the Chinese literary schoolgirl romance constructs same-sex
love as a universal feminine potential rather than just a minority identity, the figure of the same-
sex attracted school-age girl has now also found her way into more subcultural-identitarian texts
that appeal explicitly to queer audiences. The films Butterfly and Spider Lilies, cited above, fall into
this category. As Helen Hok-Sze Leung observes:
Ambivalent depictions of same-sex intimacy and desire without an attendant narrative
of sexual identity became almost unimaginable in an era when the tongzhi movement
had already gained significant visibility in the social and political spheres.
(2008, 42)Illustrating Leung’s point, tongzhi-style schoolgirl romance also appears, for example, in a wave of
lesbian popular fiction that has arisen since the late 1990s, often appearing initially online before
being published in book form by dedicated gay-and-lesbian (tongzhi) publishing houses in Taiwan