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pao” (A train traveling toward Shaoshan) from the late 1970s, Teresa
Teng’s “Meijiu jia kafei” (Fine wine and coffee) from the early 1980s, the
rock song “Zhantai” (Platform) in the mid-1980s, or the theme song of the
early-1990s telenovela Kewang (Yearning)—capture a specific temporality
and authentically evoke a particular period of history. As a whole, the use
of popular music is consistent with the filmmaker’s effort since Xiao Wu
to document the social and cultural changes that have taken place in his
hometown of Fenyang.
However, this authentic documentation of local Fenyang is
problematized by the inauthentic and hybridized dialects the protagonists
speak. As noted earlier, the protagonist in Xiao Wu speaks Henan Anyang
Mandarin, which is different from the Shanxi Fenyang Mandarin spoken
in the community where the film is set. More noticeably, none of the
four leading actors and actresses in Platform are native to the locale, and
consequently none of them speak Fenyang Mandarin, even though they
are portraying Fenyang natives: Wang Hongwei (playing Cui Mingliang)
speaks Henan Anyang Mandarin, Zhao Tao (playing Yin Ruijuan) and Liang
Jingdong (playing Zhang Jun) speak Shanxi Taiyuan Mandarin, and Yang
Tianyi (playing Zhong Ping) speaks only Putonghua (figs. 6 and 7). In a
Figure 6: The pair Cui Mingliang (played by Wang Hongwei) and Yin Ruijuan (played by Zhao
Tao) in Platform (2000)
176 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
MCLC 18.2.indd 176
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