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The name Queen’s Bench III (1990) signifies that the criminal case in this film is tried in the High Court of Justice within the English legal system. Moreover, its Cantonese title 古惑(or蠱惑, gu2 waak6)大律師 (A Mischievous Lawyer. Gǔ huò dà lǜ shī in Mandarin) refers to the characteristics of the protagonist, Zhang, a Hong Kong barrister, who is resourceful and full of unexpected legal tricks. On the night before Chen Tsu Hui (陳子輝), a local hooligan, is set to move to the U.S., he secretly meets his lover, Ms Chen, who is engaged to a wealthy man. On his way back home, he finds an unconscious girl, who has been choked and raped by the son of the village leader, Li Fan Gen (李範根). She is close to death, and so he performs CPR. However, the villagers, misunderstanding the scene, believe he is molesting the girl. They arrest and beat him and then send him to the police station. Chen Tsu Hui is subsequently charged with murder after the girl dies in hospital. Barrister Zhang accepts a pro bono offer from the government to be Chen Tsu Hui’s defence lawyer. Since Chen Tsu Hui has an ignominious life record and the true culprit imputes guilt to Chen Tsu Hui for his crime, Chen Tsu Hui looks to be losing the court case, despite the excellent performance of his lawyer, Barrister Zhang. Therefore, Barrister Zhang decides to falsify a film on VHS using CCTV (not prevalent in the early 90s), in which someone is violating the victim according to the culprit’s description of the crime scene. Ultimately, the culprit confesses that it was he who killed the girl. The truth is phenomenological. At the moment something happens, the truth is open to interpretation. The truth of something can only be understood in a historical context. As Gadamer says, “understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event”. That is to say, the truth is only a logical product made by our minds, as Vaihingar says, “our subject is the active activity of the logical function; the products of this activity—fictions.” In this paper, I will examine the connection between truth and fiction in Queen’s Bench III, represented by a videotape as visual evidence, in which a fiction that imitates the truth is the truth of the case that has been lost.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States of America (U.S.), which they regarded as a utopia. The flm The Legend of 1900, which was inspired by Alessandro Baricco’s monologue Nocecentoand directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the story about the genius pianist 1900, an orphan, who is fostered by Danny, a black coalman in the boiler room of an ocean liner, and whose parents are presumably Italian immigrants. Due to immigration law, 1900, a man with neither identity, visa, nor legal papers, cannot legally set foot on American soil. As a genius pianist, his existence is nothing more than that of musician—an entertainer to passengers on the gigantic trans-Atlantic liner Virginian, the only place he is permitted to live. According to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, a ship is “a piece of foating space, a placeless place”—a vessel transporting people to the land of their dreams. However, 1900, who has no legal status, will never arrive in utopia aboard Virginian. He can only construct a heterotopia—a mirror of utopia—so that it to him is a utopia. In the eyes of the law, 1900 is a legally non-existent person on Virginian, a placeless place. However, it is this lawless heterotopia and isolation that create a genius. In this paper, I illustrate how Virginian, as a place outside the law of land, metaphorically gives birth to a pianist, 1900, and why 1900 at the end chooses not to leave the ship, while also discussing the meaning behind the flm and the relationship between law and space.

Sharing food is an important social ritual for Chinese people and can reveal much about the family. This may be witnessed in the food scenes in Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee’s movie Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), which illustrate conflict and reconciliation, providing the viewer with an example of the traditional Chinese family and of its transformation. This chapter assesses these traditions and transformations as representative of modern ethnic Chinese domesticity and society. The protagonist Lao Zhu occupies both traditional nurturing roles, that of paternal and maternal, in that he is not only a father, but has also filled the role of a mother since the children’s mother has passed away. This special relationship, which is manifested at “the dinner table”, provides the impetus and drive for the narrative. As the nominal patriarch, Lao Zhu is undoubtedly the key figure in this film yet Julia Kristeva argues that a father invariably functions in duality: he is not only a symbolic father but is also an imaginary father. In this chapter I will use Kristeva’s theory to analyse the psychological transformation of Lao Zhu, as both a strict father and as a loving mother, a duality that shows a new Chinese family unit, represented by the father–daughter relationship in this film.

In the novel Severance, the protagonist is Candace, who was born in China and who emigrated with her Chinese parents to the U.S. At the start of the novel, she is living in New York City, where she works in the Bible section of a publishing house. She is about to work her way up to the fashion department when there is an outbreak of Shen Fever, which causes those infected to turn into mindless zombie-like creatures – the “fevered”. To survive, she joins a group and takes refuge with them in a shopping mall. It would seem that the outbreak prevents Candace from achieving her dream. I, however, would prefer to argue that it actually offers her – a Chinese immigrant woman trying to succeed under the constraints of societal law and order – a chance to break free.  

In this paper, I analyze this novel from the point of view of the law to see how Candace, in her pursuit of freedom, breaks the laws of the old world. The white male antagonist, Bob, is the embodiment of the law, leading the group into refuge and using the law to control Candace. The zombie-apocalypse represents the second chance for Candace to find utopia in dystopia.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States of America (U.S.), which they regarded as a utopia at the time. The film The Legend of 1900, which was inspired by Alessandro Baricco’s monologue Nocecento and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the story about the genius pianist 1900, an orphan, who is fostered by Danny, a black coalman in the boiler room of an ocean liner, and whose parents are presumably Italian immigrants. 

Due to immigration law, 1900, a man with neither identity, visa, nor legal papers, cannot legally set foot on American soil. As a genius pianist, his existence is nothing more than that of musician – an entertainer to passengers on the gigantic trans-Atlantic liner, Virginian, the only place he is permitted to live.  According to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, a ship is “a piece of floating space, a placeless place” as a vessel transporting people to the land of their dreams. However, 1900, who has no legal status, will never arrive in utopia aboard Virginian. He can only construct a heterotopia - a mirror of utopia – so that it to him a utopia. 

In the eyes of the law, 1900 is a legally inexistent person on Virginian a placeless place. However, it is this law enforced heterotopia and isolation, that creates a genius. In this paper, I illustrate how Virginian metaphorically gives birth to a pianist, 1900, and why he at the end chooses not to leave the ship, while also discussing the meaning behind the film and the relationship between law and space.

Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. However, the Nanjing Massacre still happened. Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, deliberately avoided mentioning the International Treaties in the imperial rescript of the Great East Asia War in 1937. The Nanking Massacre was carried out according to the Japanese army’s interpretation of the imperial rescript. Such a legal interpretation was rooted in the idea that Japan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan. In the film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), we can see both a justification of and an opposition to killing. In this paper I am going to show how the imperial rescript is used to justify this mass killing is and how opposing arguments are used to show its cruelty and absurdity, which is taken as a means to achieve a greater good.

This paper aims to use Shen Congwen’s (沈從文, 1902-1988) short story The Husband (丈夫, published in 1930) to examine ideas of monogamy and marriage in Miao culture. Shen was a Chinese Miao who wrote about the Miao people (苗族), an ethnic group in China that contains within it several racial and cultural divisions. Shen’s story The Husband aims to show that Miao couples have a bond which corresponds in strength hand validity to the Western idea of monogamy as enshrined in Christian marriage law. Marriage law in the West has a long history. Marriage itself has its roots in early Christianity. The act of marriage is considered a sacrament, alongside baptism and communion. This holy act was soon protected by a large legal edifice which became the basis for Western marriage law. When Western marriage laws were introduced into China from the West and, at the end of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traditional Chinese laws were reformed, the principle of monogamy in Chinese marriage was also established. Since monogamy did not exist as a concept in Chinese society and contradicted traditional Chinese ideas about marriage, many Han people in the early Chinese Republic continued their practice of concubinage and ended up violating the idea of monogamy of new marriage laws. On the other hand, the Miao people, although their culture was more tolerant of informal romantic relationships, tended to display a greater degree of monogamy within them. Therefore, by considering marriage from a legal and religious point of view, the author aims to analyse The Husband to show that Shen not only criticised the dark side of society in the early Republic from his perspective as a Miao, but also used a story that resembles the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis as a way to praise the Miao concept of marriage and love. Since The Husband has been adapted for the screen as Mainland Prostitute (村妓, Cunji, 1994), the film will also be used to accentuate the author’s idea.

Food, as an art form, is a carrier of its own culture. Culture, which is a crucial element to personal and national identity, is not a fixed and unchangeable entity but an ever- lasting process.

As an Asian cuisine, unlike Japanese cuisine which both techniques and tastes have been widely accepted by French people in Paris, Chinese cuisine, although it is well-known and popular, has not been considered as a haute cuisine as French and Japanese cuisine.

This paper aims to explore how Chinese cuisine, which culinary culture is not dominant in Paris, reacts to some infamous incidents—such as the health report about Chinese restaurants in 2004 and Covid-19 outbreak from Wuhan wet market—and reclaims/creates its reputation and identity based on the interview with Samuel Lee, who is from Hong Kong and now is a Michelin-star chef in Shang Palace at Shangri-La hotel in Paris. From this interview, we can see his philosophy about Chinese food, the transculturation of Chinese and French culinary culture, and an overall picture of Chinese haute cuisine in Paris.