A documentary by Yung Chang a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker currently based in Montreal.
This documentary has been receiving rave reviews. As to be expected the documentary opens with some splendid, haze shrouded pictures of the Yangtze. The film focuses on: The tourist trade, the two million people being relocated from the countryside, the modern cities and what ultimately does the Chinese dream mean?
The film begins at Chongqing, a 13 hour flight from Beijing, and the largest municipality in the world of almost 32 million people. You see coolies (peasants from the area being dammed) carrying loads of luggage onto the cruise boats for primarily western tourists who are coming to view history in the making. The documentary follows one particular peasant farmer family, the Yus’ who live in Fengdu one of the areas to be dammed.
The parents live in a dilapidated building with a tin roof and no electricity. They are unable to read and have no basic education. They are farmers and they know how to grow vegetables the way nature intended. They eat by candlelight. All the animals (chickens, a baby kitten, and dogs) lived in or around the house. This family had three children, two boys and one girl. It was not stated in the documentary but farmers in the countryside are allowed to have two children if the first born is a girl as was Yu Shui. In the past at least, extra children were not registered with the government for fear of fines or worse. Not being registered meant you could not receive schooling.
At the beginning we see the family discussing their concerns on how to pay for their kids to go to school. Yu Shui is 14 years old and has completed middle school (representative of 80% of the population). The decide to send her to work on one of the many tourist boats going up and down the River. We do not learn about the length of her work day but I think we can assume that they work from breakfast to dinner (a long day). I would really have liked to know if it was better than working in manufacturing in the big cities as we saw in the wonderful documentary China Blue www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue
The difference between the two types of jobs is that I believe skills picked up on the ship were more transferable. They were taught English and many housekeeping and waiting skills. The luxury cruise only applies to the clientele not to the workers who toil long hours below and above deck and Yu wants to go home. The managers in the documentary seemed to be very caring for their young staff and also your work group watched over you and helped where needed.
To see the tourists on the boat viewing the river and towns running along it reminded me of Stephanie Black’s documentary Life and Debt
www.lifeanddebt
The tourists were not interested in the social aspects of what they were seeing. This was just a dream holiday for them. They were taken off the boat to view one of the villages set up for the dislocated people. The selling point was that each house had a refrigerator, air conditioning and a color TV. I could not help but think this was propaganda and not all the houses would be like this.
Perhaps the biggest shocks was how the under 30 educated urban Chinese from middle class backgrounds were so demanding. It was though they thought that they deserved everything in life right now. Making money was a top priority; their passion indeed to be accomplished by whatever means available. During the documentary one of the training managers who fires one of them says that they were over-confident, arrogant, conceited and full of a sense of entitlement. Pretty damming words!
Occasionally we see pictures of the cities and the first thing that comes to my mind is how much electricity is being gobbled up and wasted as neon lights were all over many buildings all night.
At the end of the documentary we see Yu Shui’s family loading up their humble possessions and sadly moving. As food becomes scarcer around the world I wonder if China will lament the flooding of so much farm land.
Find out more about the documentary by visiting the web site
www.uptheyangtze.com
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