Retrospective: Wang Sha & Ye Feng
Various directors
Shaw Brothers, Celestial Pictures, Kay’s Productions, Mei Ah Entertainment: 1974—82
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It is hard to overstate the multimedia sway that the late comedians Wang Sha and Ye Feng held over two generations of Chinese Singaporeans. From the 1960s to the 1990s, they reigned over Chinese television, radio and film; released comedy and music albums; and performed on stage in revues, theatres and Chinese operas, even fronting ad campaigns for brands like Fujifilm. The reach of this ‘treasured pair’ extended to Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan. After spells in those places, though, Wang Sha and Ye Feng returned home to find they had become linguistic exiles.

A famous Wang Sha–Ye Feng joke ranks Singapore languages on their conciseness. The duo demonstrates: to answer “Where are you from? What are you doing?” it takes twenty long-winded yet mellifluous words to say “I’m Cantonese. I’m drinking wine.” In Hainanese, sixteen words; Hokkien: just twelve, because they are straightforward folk; Teochew: eight—they’re so “clean and simple… they’ll even swallow the cup with it”. But English, of the local variety, takes the cake: “Who? Me! What? Drink!”

Clad in their signature black vests, their faces painted clown-white, the duo’s early live act revolved around such rapid-fire wordplay in various fangyan, which are regional languages across China, erroneously but commonly referred to as ‘Chinese dialects’. In their prime in the 1960s and 1970s, Wang Sha, the taller, thinner and older one, acted in Teochew, while Cantonese was Ye Feng’s forte, with a sprinkling of Bazaar Malay and Singlish. The Laurel and Hardy of the East—or, the more concise Ah Pui and Ah San (Hokkien for ‘Fatty’ and ‘Skinny’)—brought their extraordinary mastery of these living languages to the traditional performing art of xiangsheng. Crosstalk, or comic dialogue, originated on the streets of nineteenth-century China and made its way to Singapore’s stages, where both actors got their start in performance troupes.

It was on the stage of New World Amusement Park that the comedic combo was first teamed up in 1961, by the New Life Revue. They were already individually established by then, but Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s popular double act reached an even wider audience with the advent of television. Just a year after its introduction here, the pair’s virgin TV skit aired in 1964. Their coarsely catchy songs and xiangsheng comedies, visually contrasting and well-formed personas, and use of witty fangyan connected with a linguistically diverse population on the brink of independence. As the researcher Su Zhang Kai reminisces, in his definitive book on the duo, “How many people’s childhood memories are of… standing outside their neighbour’s window, looking in at Wang Sha and Ye Feng come and go in that box?”

From the streets to the stage, then from the small screen to silver screen: Singapore’s Asian Film Archive spotlights a less-celebrated yet essential component of Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s legacy—their Hong Kong films. After their hit TV shows, the comedic couple was courted to the Cantonese cultural hub and went on to act in more than forty movies, including for the legendary Shaw Brothers studio, from the 1970s to early 1980s. This move made them two of the earliest Chinese Singaporean transnational stars, after the dimming of the golden age of Malay cinema in Singapore.

The twenty-six films screening as part of Retrospective: Wang Sha & Ye Feng, also comprising talks and an exhibition of filmic artefacts, are a testament to their breadth both as solo performers and a beloved pair. The majority are slapstick and social-realist comedies, but there are also light-hearted period dramas, a Chinese opera, a weepie and wuxia and kung fu flicks. Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s decade of overseas movies is a time capsule of two Asian Tiger societies as they rapidly developed—when money trumped morality, and people were (are?) finding ways to cope with huge change and inequality. Showing again in their original languages, in a country that has since outlawed them from mass media, they are also a stubborn love letter to fangyan.

Like John Montgomery asked in his 1954 survey of early comedy films, “How many of today’s comedians will be worth seeing on the screen twenty years hence?” With a format that responds to the zeitgeist using the tools of the moment, most of Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s comedies are no longer laugh-out-loud funny. Today’s viewer might find their slapstick tiresome, like they might the skit-like, episodic structures in which plots are a trifle, some techniques (freeze-frame reaction shots, silly sound effects, rushed endings plugging sequels) charmingly dated and the gratuitous female nudity plus sexist jokes downright unfunny. As products of their time, however, these pictures are still worth seeing for their lively insights into how to survive the money-obsessed urban jungle.

“Each one of these twenty-six films,” as the exhibition curator Yeo Min Hui notes, “either tells a story, or carries a subplot, of trying to make ends meet or to make a windfall.” Across the range of genres, these tales of economic survivalism and brotherhood establish a desperate, dog-eat-dog Hong Kong where Wang Sha and Ye Feng tend to play the relatable everyman. They are country bumpkins in the big city—a common trope in Hong Kong cinema then—noble thieves or conmen, or simply old-fashioned. As emblems of the past, their underdogs struggle, humorously and together, to make sense of the harsh competition and materialism of these brave new worlds.

Hunger and greed are constants here. Fresh off the train from rural China, Ye Feng’s Ah Niu in The Crazy Bumpkins (1974; the first film of the successful series, the heart of their cinematic output) is delighted when he finds out, at the police station, that prisoners are fed: “I’m starving, can I eat now?” Oftentimes homeless, these characters are at the mercy of greedy landlords. In The Crooks (1977), whose Mandarin title translates to “Thirty-six strategies for finding food”, the “nastiest landlady ever” has installed a third level to bunk beds and rents them out by the square foot. At work, bosses treat workers like disposable pawns, and industrial action is rife despite strikes being illegal: Ah Niu twice takes the fall for his colleagues in The Crazy Bumpkins—he is fired, then ends up in blessed jail. Imprisonment, as a reprieve from a society in which “it’s hard to get a job and there’s no one to talk to at home”, is a goal in The Happy Trio (1975), probably their most well-rounded standalone film, and the overarching plot of Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s return to their homeland, Crazy Bumpkins in Singapore (1976), the series finale.

In this world, social mobility is impossible, save for sheer miracles like a bag of riches dropping from the sky in Big Times for the Crazy Bumpkins (1976). As a moneylender declares in Thief of Thieves (1975): “No matter how much your daughter earns from the factory, it won’t be enough.” This futility is also evidenced by the very pattern of the Crazy Bumpkins series: at every turn, when Ah Niu and his cunning, moustachioed uncle (Wang Sha) come into money, someone robs them or they lose it, with even the uncle exploiting and betraying his nephew. Socioeconomic ranks are hard—and violent. In The Happy Trio, when Ye Feng’s lower-class character touches a gloved lady’s arm, in a case of mistaken identity, she has her boyfriend beat him up for “dirtying” her. Even love and desire have a high price: sex work abounds, and as that moneylender tells a mother, trying to get her to sell her daughter, “The world looks down on poverty, not prostitution.”

When it’s Every Man for Himself (1980), the films and characters of Wang Sha and Ye Feng also remind us that there are bigger things in life. Ah Niu, for all his suffering across the Crazy Bumpkins series, retains his inherent goodness and childlike innocence, like a bulwark of tradition, and emerges resiliently uncorrupted by cities. The advice of Ah Niu’s mother at the start of the four films acts as a moral compass. She reminds him to “keep your belongings inside, don’t talk nonsense. You must be honest and don’t lie, understand?” These essential values (self-protection, kindness, integrity) are later expanded upon by Ah Niu’s love interest in Big Times for the Crazy Bumpkins (1976): “Money is not everything… it is important to know what’s right and wrong, know who your friends are, in order to live a happy life.”

Amorality, however, can also mean that the law needs to be taken into one’s own hands, while still upholding some sense of ancient justice. Where corruption and bribery abound—by civil servants in Big Times for the Crazy Bumpkins, by the police in The Girlie Bar (1976)—and the justice system favours criminals, such as in Thief of Thieves, here comes Ye Feng. In the last, he plays an honourable, rule-bound thief who echoes Robin Hood: “We rob the rich but not the poor.” Breaking away from a century-old gang, our hero hides to watch inequities happen, then intervenes to correct things, finally extracting a little something for his troubles. In a bid to use the ways of the world against itself, and even thrive, Ye Feng’s con artist in The Crooks scams the scammers. He gains a family of sorts in a newfound disciple and a sneaky compatriot (a radiant Sakura Teng, the singer, in one of the few strong female roles). In The Mad Monk series, Ye Feng is an enigmatic outsider monk who rights wrongs. In one episode, he intervenes when a moneylender publicly demands payment, or a pound of flesh, from a debtor. Like a rhetorical philosopher, the monk’s naive questions raise broader issues about modernity and urbanity: “Why doesn’t he have money?” “Why can’t you all chip in?”

Beyond humanism, comradeship and vigilantism, if one is flat broke again, there’s always busking on the streets. I found myself moved by the rags-to-riches singer Ah Jiao’s choice in The Happy Trio to return to street performances, with Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s characters, singing lyrics like: “The poor still have friends, the rich kill themselves if stock prices go down / They are the fools.” (Playing up their recession-proof skills as all-round entertainers, these movies are studded with song sequences that beautifully compress storytelling and characterisation; Ye Feng was a more than capable singer.) And, if all else fails, one can count on karmic retribution. In the Mr Funny Bone series based on the celebrated manhua (comic books), Wang Sha’s iconic Old Master Q inadvertently reveals and rights the ills of the capitalistic world, in skits about queueing and littering, for instance, oftentimes through swiftly delivered poetic justice.

As movie performers, Wang Sha had the longer career, having acted in two Chinese Malayan movies in Singapore before his Hong Kong days. He mostly excelled at playing hyperbolic and hilarious villains in movies like Return of the Con Men (1977), The Boxer from the Temple (1979), Coward Bastard (1980) and Every Man for Himself, usually complete with crazy eyebrows and wacky costumes. With a body like a spring and a rubber face, his effortlessly exaggerated characters come to life with his keen, Chaplin-esque sense of physical humour. In Coward Bastard, for example, it’s amusing to see his tyrannical restaurant boss being brought down. Humiliated, Wang Sha bobs his head while walking, like a bird toothpick-dispenser, his voice rises several notches and his hands fly helplessly. There’s something to be said, too, about his broad farce’s childishness as a way of coping with harsh realities.

It is Ye Feng, though, who perhaps escaped being typecast, and gradually delivered more nuanced performances. Especially in the Crazy Bumpkins series, for which he won Outstanding Comedic Actor at the 1974 Asian Film Festival, Ye Feng commandingly portrays Ah Niu’s guileless nature with a big, open face and trusting eyes, peasant gait and nasal, stuttering voice prone to malapropisms. He sells, in spades, this hard-to-believe character. Signed to John Lo Mar’s company (the director of nine of these films), while Wang Sha was contracted to the Shaws, Ye Feng went on to outrightly dramatic roles in The Happy Trio, in which he is a wonderfully understated drifter, as a fisherman defending his country in the Teochew opera Farewell to a Warrior (1976; despite him being Hakka) and a beleaguered father—one of the few controlled elements—in the histrionic melodrama The Girlie Bar.

One could draw a line from these films to Jack Neo’s comedy in Singapore, or mo lei tau (‘makes no sense’) humour in Hong Kong. Neo, who grew up watching Wang Sha, himself went from a song-and-dance troupe to TV variety-show skits and frequently formulaic films. He, too, trains his focus on the man on the street and calls Wang Sha and Ye Feng the “originators” of Singapore’s and Malaysia’s Chinese comedy scenes. In Hong Kong comedies of the mid-1970s—when Cantonese made a comeback—the Hui brothers’ films are usually considered precursors of mo lei tau (as later best exemplified by Stephen Chow’s films). But there’s a decidedly lowbrow, nonsensical nature to the concurrent gags of wacky slapsticks like Mr Funny Bone Strikes Again (1978), Return of the Con Men (Wang Sha in bed with his mistress and a flock of chickens! Chickens that poop gold!) and the cooking kung fu of Coward Bastard that could also qualify.

By the time Wang Sha and Ye Feng returned to Singapore in the 1980s, the Speak Mandarin Campaign was in full swing. From 1979, fangyan was forbidden in broadcast media, a policy that holds true today for free-to-air channels, while Hong Kong films, for instance, can only be shown in their original Cantonese during special cinema screenings (such as this retrospective). Fresh from their successes abroad, the comedy partners returned to TV and radio and had to perform only in Mandarin, a language that Wang Sha compared to “vegetarian meat” when it came to comedy—Cantonese was their “bite of real meat”, fangyan their “martial arts powers”. In interviews, the pair put forth that monolingual Singapore comedy was ineffective; they felt more at home joking in a wider family of languages. Ye Feng, the younger of the two, died first in 1995, after apparently laughing twice. He was sixty-three. Wang Sha followed him in 1998.

Soon after, the journalist-historian Tan Juan Han paid homage to the legacy of Wang Sha–Ye Feng in Lianhe Zaobao, a Singapore Chinese newspaper. Tan mourned that we had long lost them, even before their passing, and their full-fledged performances due to Singapore’s Chinese-language policy. The scholar Liew Kai Khiun elsewhere calls this policy “a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardized linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect-speaking peripheries”. The Chinese Studies academic Wah Guan Lim goes further: Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s act being “cleaned up” to Mandarin, a fate that also befell other non-Mandarin Chinese entertainers, “spelled the end of an era during which culture came to fruition organically among the grassroots, and silenced the public voice of an entire generation of [Chinese] Singaporeans”.

In Lianhe Zaobao, Tan also interestingly compared Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s multilingual catchphrase, 弟喂，做人Agak-Agak就好 (“Hey brother, to be human, more or less is enough”) to kiasu-ism. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as someone “governed by self-interest”, and by the Coxford Singlish Dictionary as literally meaning, in Hokkien, “‘afraid of losing’… possibly our defining national characteristic”, being kiasu may seem fundamentally opposed to Wang Sha and Ye Feng’s easygoing ethos. But, to Tan, they are complementary ways of being: since thousands are fighting to be first, losers are bound to emerge. Their catchphrase, then, is comfort and consolation to “all those who cannot pass exams with flying colours, all those who cannot afford to live in a huge house. These people make up the vast majority of society.”

Reviewing these films alone at home, ahead of the retrospective, I can only anticipate their true homecoming to someone like my late grandmother. A Hainanese, she refused to pass on her language to her grandchildren due to the Speak Mandarin Campaign. We could only communicate through my parent-translators, or by acting out our lines like silent-film performers. How would she have reacted if she could see and hear fangyan on the big screen again?

Although I’m not Cantonese, a secondhand emotional resonance from the language carries over. This feeling was clearest to me while watching Crazy Bumpkins in Singapore. The original Cantonese version is believed to be lost, and the surviving Mandarin copy cannot come close to the former’s spark and verve. It’s historically accurate, though, and funny and a shame, all at once. Watching Wang Sha and Ye Feng tromp around their real-life country, in the 1970s, acting as Hong Kongers, having words put into their mouths.

This essay was completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship.

• Tags: Dan Koh, Free to read, Issue 34, Wang Sha, Ye Feng