TY - BOOK AU - Yonggang Wu AU - Yonggang Wu AU - Lingyu Ruan AU - Tian Jian AU - Zhizhi Zhang TI - Shen nu: The Goddess AV - PN1997 .S546 1934 PY - 1934/// CY - China PB - Lianhua Film Company N1 - N2 - From case cover: Ruan Ling-yu plays a prostitute who uses her earnings to support and educate her son. The title of the film "The Goddess" was the Shanghai way of describing a woman who sells her body. The heroine is forced to enter this oldest of professions as it is the only way for her and her child to survive and to provide fro his education. One night she encounters a gangster as she flees from the police. he forces her to work for him, giving up her earnings at the end of each night. Yet she is able to hide some of her money in order to continue payments to her son's school. The school board discovers her occupation, and the boy is expelled despite the pleading of the sympathetic headmaster. When the gangster steals her money, the prostitute after a brief struggle kills him. She is sent to prison for 12 years. The final scene in jail depicts the headmaster promising to raise her son, forestalling his son being sent to an orphanage. Raun's acting in the last sequence displays her complicated response to the news of her child's good fortune and the kindness of the headmaster. Ruan, as in so many of her films, is the symbol of China's suffering. Only as a prostitute could she support her child and give him an education ER -