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Inhabiting the City: Tropes of "Home" in Contemporary Chinese Cinema Author(s): Haiping Yan Source: China Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 93-135Published by: Chinese University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23462230Accessed: 20-09-2015 03:38 UTC

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The China Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 93-135

Inhabiting the City: Tropes of "Home" in Contemporary Chinese

Cinema

Haiping Yan*

Abstract

Urbanization has been fueling massive migrations across various

regions in China, redrawing its physiognomy as much as patterns of

relations among all its inhabitants. Amid such redrawing in the life

world, “home” (jia 家），a term referring to the material place and

related objects used in family life and a trope evoking a “psychic，，

sense of belonging, has been gaining ascendancy in and across all the

artistic and public media, including contemporary Chinese cinema. By

bringing three Chinese films produced in the 2010s into a constellation,

this essay traces the distinct ways in which a cinematic aesthetic

Haiping YAN, formerly full professor at Cornell University in theatre and film,

comparative literature, and East Asian literatures, is university professor of cross

cultural studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Her major publications include

Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948; Other Trans

nationals, and Theatre and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese

Drama.

* I would like to thank Lucia Nagib and Andrew Tudor for inviting me to

present part of my initial material on this topic with a differential thematic

and analytical focus at the Mixed Cinema Network meeting in the United

Kingdom. My special thanks to David Bathrich of Cornell University for his

generous suggestions and patient support that led me to look beyond the

realm of the literary and into the domain of cinema and the media in general,

from cross-cultural perspectives.



94 Haiping Yan

transpires to significantly reconfigure some of the familiar logics of

representation. More specifically, this essay examines how such recon

figuration turns into a critical telescope that variably mobilizes tropes

of "home" as differential imaginaries of an "urban China," involving

important implications for studies of the arts and their social efficacy,

in China and beyond.

Urbanization has been fueling massive migrations across various regions in China, redrawing its physiognomy as much as patterns of relations

among all its inhabitants. With the rooted lives and regions moving to

make way for the demands of an urbanizing China, questions of how the

citizens of such times inhabit the drastically shifting conditions in a world

of displacement and fluidity arise and find their ways into various cultural

articulations. Precipitated by and/or charged with such questions, "home"

(jia 家），a term referring to the material place and related objects used in

family life and a trope evoking a “psychic，，sense of belonging, has been

gaining ascendancy in and across all the artistic and public media,

including, as this essay addresses, contemporary Chinese cinema. By

bringing three Chinese films produced in the 2010s into a constellation, this essay traces the specific ways in which a cinematic aesthetic tran

spires to significantly reconfigure some of the familiar logics of represen tation including bildungsroman literature, dialectic drama, and live

performance. This essay further examines how such reconfiguration turns

into a critical telescope that variably mobilizes tropes of “home’’ as differ

ential imaginaries of an “urban China," involving important implications for studies of the arts and their social efficacy, in China and beyond.

1. Shanghai Women: The "Home Question" and City Openings

Emblematic of urban China and China's urbanization, Shanghai has long constituted a primary site of formative dynamics in Chinese arts and literature. Filmmakers since the 1990s in particular have enlisted the city as a fertile, ambiguous, and volatile field against which competing tropes of urban life display their ingenuities and complexities. Distinct from some of the spectacles of exotic sound and fury in a range of films by “the fifth generation film directors,"1 women directors such as Peng Xiaolian

彭小蓮 2 and others have reminded us of a dimension of contemporary Chinese arts that has been much ignored in our present criticism and



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home ”

in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 95

interpretive literatures.3 Peng's relatively earlier work Shanghai Women

假裝沒感覺（2002)，4 for instance, is a measured and quiet "small and

simple tale" of the ordinary residents in an otherwise roaring phantasma

goric "Shanghai metropolis," featuring a clear-eyed schoolgirl, Ah Xia (阿

霞，‘‘morning dew"), and Mama (媽媽，‘‘Ah Xia's mother"), a soft

voiced school teacher. As history would have it, in the early years of the

People's Republic, Mama's profession brought her unprecedented social

respect, if only temporarily and however limited.5 At the beginning of

the new century, she finds herself confronted by a different social situa

tion: In the late 1980s, the government began to adopt a policy to rede

fine housing distribution in urban China as belonging to the market

rather than the state. To help initiate the enforcement of such a policy

change, the working units in urban China coordinated their housing resources with the understanding that one member of each married

couple would receive an assigned housing space with a payment much

less than the "market value.” Mama's working unit does not have such

resources, while her husband receives an assigned apartment from his

company. As it happens, her husband develops an assumption, in part due to the apartment but also the social signals involved in the process, that he is gaining the upper hand and can carry on an extramarital affair

without qualms. The first marriage thereby ends. Mama's second

husband is from an economically humble background and turns more

and more "frugal" as the society around him becomes more and more

affluent. He seems to believe that he has authority over not only the

expenditures of the family but also the basic needs of everyone in the

family, largely because, in a similar way, he has received the assignment of his apartment with a "policy payment" under the market value. The

film ends as Mama and Ah Xia find a small room of their own, paid for

with Mama's negligible salary and the settlement that the court granted as a result of her divorce from her first husband.

The film is an adaptation of a short fiction story titled "Turning Seventeen" by Xu Minxia 徐敏霞，a female writer from Shanghai.6 It is

a story of a young woman who manages to persevere through the

divorce of her parents and her mother's second failed marriage, as well

as her own first imaginary and second attempted but failed romances.

Retelling a "domestic drama" of sorts, which the literary text offers in

normally defined terms, the film Shanghai Women, as might be

expected, includes a range of domestic scenes well depicted or concisely hinted at in the original short text. Of the 94-minute film, approximately



96 Haiping Yan

one-third of the scenes are set within apartments. The film opens in the

apartment that Ah Xia considers as her natural home shared with her

biological parents. Its quality, registered in such details as floral wall

paper, European paintings on the wall, Shanghai-style curtains, and fine

furniture, indicates the status of an upper-middle-class family. No sooner

than this introduction of the site is made, the crisis among its inhabitants

is revealed: that the father has been carrying on an extramarital affair is

not news, but his newly expressed indifference toward his wife, Ah

Xia's Mama, comes as a surprise to the mother and the daughter. Mama

struggles to conceal her internal turmoil and asks for a divorce. Again as

a surprise, the father seems entirely accommodating: he agrees to it and

lets the woman have custody of their daughter as part of the settlement.

Yet the magnanimous gesture is exposed when it comes to the issue of

housing: "This apartment is mine. My company assigned it to me and I

paid for it. But where are you going to go, and with our daughter, if you don't have a place of your own?" Mama realizes that her husband has

no intention to give up his claims on her and their daughter. With his

estimation about the importance of property and his ability to make

money, he sees very little in the concepts of "love" or "self-respect" or

some such ideas in which his wife seems sentimentally embedded.

Mama collects her items of daily use and, one minute later, walks out of

the door of the apartment, with Ah Xia tailing her.

The second domestic scene in the film occurs in a much crowded

and rundown building with a stone-framed doorway indicating its long

history as feature architecture in old Shanghai as well as its lower

middle-class status in the city today. This is where Mama's mother

resides. Finding herself back in her own old mother's room, Mama

receives an eight-minute lecture from the elderly that seems to be a

present interpretation of an ancient, generalized prejudice: "To be a woman means to learn to be disadvantaged. It is not a woman's fate if

everything goes your way." Delivered with care or love at least in

intension, old mother sees Mama as an unmistakable failure in the

marital institution only. Mama remains quiet. The center of gravity of the lecture gradually shifts to focus on the other, more pressing problem Mama is preoccupied with, namely, the barely 17-year-old Ah Xia: "You are a mother; you haven't thought about how and what to do after

wards?" When Mama responds, "I can't bear the misery of being treated in the way . . . her mother cuts her off: "You can't bear what he has

brought to you. How can the child bear what you have brought to her,



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of "Home" in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 97

running around without a home?" Mama, angry when walking off of her

husband's property, now falls into silence. Ah Xia listens. The domestic

dwelling that they have left behind is more than that of an unfaithful

husband or a selfish father, but of their status in life gained through heterosexual marriage and property. They have lost the key with which

the meanings of their identities in social relations are organized as

elements and/or emblems of "a family." The rest of the scene plays out

somewhat predictably: The institution of housing, defined by the idea of

biological descent and concomitant property distribution, is further

shown by the fact that old mother's place is going to be inherited by Mama's brother as the son of the family with a marriage pending. "You

can only stay here for a short while," old mother puts it directly to her

daughter; "this is to be your brother's place as soon as he gets married."

And with her salary as a school teacher, she cannot afford a rented house

to bring up her daughter. Then the first order of business for her is to get married again. Mama enters her second marriage with Old Lee , a

middle-aged, honest, and hardworking man whose wife died of an illness

while leaving him a teenage son. The camera follows Mama and Ah Xia

as they step into the third domestic space in their lives in the film: the

apartment owned by Old Lee, the size of which provides "a family of

four" a measure of basic stability, with little else. No sooner than Mama

attempts to add a sense of care by taking some initiatives in their "family

life," crises ensue as Old Lee invariably intervenes by the way of

insisting his authority on "all family matters," which ultimately leads to

the demise of this second marriage.

Shanghai Women, in its narrative hitherto, does not seem to offer

much that is particularly novel, as it follows the original literary tale, a

bildungsroman of a female version and a conventionally rendered trau

matic becoming. At the level of visuospatial formation, however, the

film issues an intermedial move that brings about a turn of focus and

doubles the scenes of domestic interiority with openings of the city. As

Ah Xia follows Mama and steps out of the apartment owned by her

biological father, for instance, the camera begins to take on a dynamic life of its own and drives open a prolonged moment for a street space in

full and various motions. Ah Xia, having taken leave of all the given definitions of her life, strenuously pushes her bicycle laden with motley utensils and walks among crowds of people, cars and trucks, and

bicycles.7 A wash basin falls from her bicycle. Ah Xia stops. A huge truck speeds by Ah Xia and runs over the wash basin. Mama walks over,



98 Haiping Yan

picks up the battered wash basin, and scrutinizes it as if scrutinizing an

eliminated life. Ah Xia walks over and joins the scrutiny. The two

women burst into laughter in the middle of heavy traffic, thereby

crystallizing an irreversible turn in their lives that registers the

connotations of what they have done: In the thick of the temporal

predicament of the loss of the original "home," the street scene so

enlivened turns into a dwelling of sorts, whereby Ah Xia stands shoulder

by shoulder with Mama, resisting or refuting or really rejecting the

humanly exorbitant prices claimed by the materially abundant

domesticity that is also a prevailing imaginary of "the good life" of the

city, for the sake of something along the lines of an "emotional truth,"

"gender equality," or "human dignity" that has increasingly appeared inconsequential if not unintelligible in the dominant discourses since the 1990s. Here is an opening amid a temporal order that is deeply gendered,

gesturing toward and indeed bodying forth a different form of being as and in human relationship beyond the logic of the ordered times.

It is in such a space that Ah Xia comes into the focal point of the camera. The camera articulates the "home scenes" with rather meticu

lously rendered details of domestic materiality and in sync with a narrative of psychological realism as provided by the original literary text. Those "home scenes" with their established arrangement of urban

domesticity, predictably, always if not already locate Ah Xia secondary to her parents including Mama, who is in turn secondary to the

apartment owner.

Of the three "homes" in the film, for instance, grandmother's dwelling is the most sympathetic toward Ah Xia. But even this site also turns out to be a place of compromise at best and of coercive complicity at worst. Grandma accommodates Ah Xia and Mama in crisis indeed, but only temporarily and not spatially. In the interiority of her dwelling where she listens and lectures Mama, it is as a failure in life that Mama is recognizable and as a victim of life that Ah Xia is "pitied." Only as

interceding momentums generated between such scenes of literary realism and cinematic streets of uncertain mobility that Ah Xia's life in relation to others gains its significant strength and value, wherein real decisions for change are being made by and among real and the most

ordinary people, such as Ah Xia and Mama. In the moment that follows the two women, out of the "home scene," for instance, the camera begins to effect cinematic significations beyond the bildungsroman narrative and illuminates Ah Xia in an actively changing relation to Mama and the



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home” in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 99

environment. While Mama is astutely cognizant of the danger of

displacement and a nonplace amid open streets crisscrossed by speeding vehicles and/or moving machines, Ah Xia charts the streets into an

enabling field for her to deepen and assert her otherwise unseen strength. When the camera begins to show how Ah Xia tries to collect herself for

Mama's second marriage, for instance, it turns the streets into places where Ah Xia navigates the complicating forces of the world around her

by asking questions that redefine all given relationships in this world,

including that with Mama, thereby remaking herself in an open process that is form changing and form giving at the same time. After accompa

nying Mama to take the wedding photo with "Uncle Lee” 李叔叔，for

instance, Ah Xia stops on the streets outside the photo studio as traffic

passes by in the front of her at high speed: "It is not for his apartment that you decide to marry him, is it?" she asks, simply but seriously. Mama responds simply and seriously, "No. Old Lee is a decent person，， and "we must live well even if we have left your father." Ah Xia

validates Mama's reply by refuting the implied need for having the

father as measurement: ‘‘Today is a good day." Mama agrees, "Yes.

Your father will regret not being able to have you in his life." Ah Xia

remains clear and becomes more explicit: "Such regrets have no value."

Mama agrees again: "No. Let's go!，’ The moments normally considered as the most private hereby merge

with the impersonal public streets, leading to a series of long shots and

close-ups, tracing Ah Xia walking amid increasing traffic, either with

Mama, shoulder to shoulder, with a fellow traveler in the traffic of city life, or with schoolmates and neighborhood teens, a mobile presence of

critical contemplation in the crowds, inhabiting the streets in a way that

redefines the usual meaning of the "private home，，and "public street" as

well as the binary between the two with her unsettled being and

uncharted becoming. When following Mama's eye, the camera often

evokes if implicitly the shadows of the untimely or the placeless, the

human lives set adrift, unprepared and endangered by the crisscrossing traffic. When following Ah Xia's sight, the interior scenes of their two

"homes" in crisis are crisscrossed with an imperturbable stillness or

heavy suffocation. Always preplaced in the corners of those "homes," Ah Xia on the streets appears visibly taller and moves with activating

energy. Once, at a school yard, a young man tries to make Ah Xia the

female object of his "private" romance. Losing patience, Ah Xia asks

him, "What would you be if your father is no longer your father?"



100 Haiping Yan

Sending the young man into a state of mental confusion, Ah Xia takes

off on her bicycle, nimble and dynamic. A resilient camera chases her

on bicycle moving through the complex networks of the streets in the

city of Shanghai, in swift motions, with the variable rhythms of a supple

body in transformation. As if looking at nothing with her eyes wide open and yet seeing everything, Ah Xia wanders across the rapidly extending metropolis, arriving at the bank of Suzhou River, the mother river of the

city since its initial configuration in the 19th century, while darkness

descends. Her question vibrates in silence throughout the cinematic

space as registered in her movements, an unfathered life in search for a mode of being in the making and remaking, undetermined by sanctions

of a given authority or the assurance of a destiny established by ready formations of one's origins in history.

Without ready-made scripts to follow, the 17-year-old Ah Xia begins life anew by actively inhabiting the public sites of the city where she

reshapes her questions and improvises her answers. Riding on such

improvisational momentum, she starts communicating with “Uncle Lee" and his son, Qiang Qiang 強強，as her "brother," unthwarted by displays of uninformed judgment or arrogant prejudice, overt or hidden hostilities, intended or unintended misunderstandings, with a refocused attention to those who may or may not have blood ties with her and/or provide mate rial comfort for her but actually share her life or aspects of her life, as well as the challenges that such life poses. When, at the neighborhood playground, the much too frugal Uncle Lee forces his son to take off the new shoes that Mama bought for him in front of all his peers in the middle of their sports activities, Ah Xia finds herself prompted to confront Uncle Lee, arguing for an understanding about how harmful such an imposition can be, how important it is to respect others, and how such respect concerns the centrality of the idea of human dignity in

any relationship that really is much more important than other logics such as that of “money，，and “money saving.，，In such a process, evoca tive of an acting out but constitutive of a working through of the difficult “home question" that she confronts,8 Ah Xia gains an understanding of

Qiang Qiang's crisis caused by an interventionist father, forgetting or

coming through her own chagrin about the mother who cannot afford

anything for her and yet spends on her "brother" so generously, all the while offering her care to another human being, all of which denotes a moment of human mutuality as the route for homecoming humanity. Ah Xia hereby brings about an imaginative way of being human beyond the




rubrics of biological genealogy and institutional ownership. "Home"

hereby is no longer a given entity instituted by the parental order, mate

rial property, and established norms of social hierarchy. Rather, it is a moment of social relations made through the act of caring for others that

also is a process of actualizing one's own sense of social identity, in the

making of a relational history. As crucial changes in Ah Xia's life in the film transpire at open sites

of the city, such a city space then not only witnesses Ah Xia's attempt at

forging her own humanity and its social belonging; it is made with or

simply is her motion itself, blurring and transforming the categories of

the interior and exterior, inside and outside as much as private and

public, as humanly embodied space in motion. Various city sites, with

their sense of fluid openness, resonate with a mobile Ah Xia that

exceeds the textual order of a repressive domesticity and amounts to a

life space itself, designating the city "as an abode of everyone" with

inherently uncertain and hence always transformational possibilities. The

significance of such a mobile space of the humanly embodied is

enunciated further in the second time of her leaving "home"—Old Lee's

apartment—with Mama. The initial incident is triggered when Old Lee

sees the monthly water bill and flies into a rage: for him, Mama and Ah

Xia are wasteful; for Ah Xia, this is the last example of his constant

imposition of his authority over every member of the family, an

authority that is predicated upon his ownership of their single largest

property: "Money will not fall from the sky, it is saved bit by bit; this

apartment is no gift! I paid 50,000 dollars for it. I am not your meal

ticket." In the midst of a confused and disturbing exchange, Mama and

Ah Xia hit the streets, getting into a taxi with no idea of where to go. A

cooling down Old Lee runs after them and, thinking that his "frugality" is the issue, tries to compensate by paying the taxi driver with a roll of

money. Mama pauses. She knows that she and Ah Xia can have only one place to go, which is no place for the two of them: "Old Lee's life

is not easy, alone and with a child," Mama says to Ah Xia, as if to her

self. Ah Xia replies, decisively, "You can decide not to live with my father, why cannot I decide to not to return to the Lee's place?" As the

voice reverberates through the night air of the street, the camera takes a

long shot that sends the taxi into the vastness of the city at night, as if a

ripple in an ocean of the metropolis in darkness that registers a deep emotional truth of the socially inconsequential, a relentless impetus for

and insistence on the ignored, repressed, or long trivialized idea of



102 Haiping Yan

human dignity. Ah Xia and Mama are mutually sustaining companions and kindred spirits in the rebirthing of humanity in the dark night of the

city vibrant with silent strivings and yearnings. Such a moment of rebirth comes with agony of a particular kind for

the unfathered. The intensity of Ah Xia's struggle to conceal such agony indicates the degree of its pain that shows when Mama discovers her

diaries. An outraged Ah Xia attacks Mama. With much regret, Ah Xia

learns from her grandmother that Mama is on her way to remarry Ah

Xia's biological father in a desperate attempt to resolve the "painful situation" of their "homelessness" and giving Ah Xia "back" the home

she rightly deserves. "I ask her to remarry him, totally for you, you child!" Grandmother says in tears. The camera shifts from a close-up of

the grandmother's suffering face to a close-up of Ah Xia's eyes filled

with tears and then, moved by crane, the camera shifts to and out of the

window of the room on a second floor; unfolding down there on the

streets is the longest articulation of a mobile image of Ah Xia, of

Shanghai and an urban China, the signature feature of the cinematic

aesthetic of Shanghai Women: a young woman's tender and resilient

body riding forcefully on her bicycle through long streets of the urban

space telescoping the possible patterns of being human and modes of

human relations on the way and indeed all the way, leaving her bodily prints on the city as much as moving its entirety into a moving environ

ment that is also a promise for social change. Ah Xia and the city hereby amount to an operative prism and an intermedial connective; a trans

forming human scenario plays out as an actually built environment

humanly inhabited. As the camera finally slows down at a bus stop, Ah

Xia, after overtaking a public bus that carries a full load of passengers including Mama, is filmed waiting there for the bus to arrive when Mama steps out. She resolutely puts a stop to Mama's attempted "return

to the place that is not home." With high-volume traffic passing by in front of her, Ah Xia on her bicycle reshapes the Shanghai landscape into a focus of reflection as much as reconsideration, re-enunciating the city land as a field of dynamic openings, possibilities, and probabilities.

It is time to note here that all such scenes were shot within the built streets of actual Shanghai. In contradistinction with the domestic scenes that are all shot at sites of a filming base constructed, owned, and run by Shanghai Film Studio and the Cinema-Television Corporation of

Shanghai, the camera that moves beyond the shooting artifacts of constructed domestic housing leverages if not predicates its motion upon




the live streets full of actual ordinary people. Streets short or long,

winding lanes of residential units, corners or walkways, small shops or

department stores or malls, buses, bus stops, playgrounds, and intersec

tions of crossroads, these and such sites in Shanghai Women were

chosen for their ordinariness in the city and filmed as active exponents of a cinematic environment and functioned as material carriers of an

environmental history, gaining the status of a multiple, variable body, a

spatial opening for human residencies of differential kinds. The bus stop where Ah Xia stops Mama's attempt to "return home," specifically, was

shot on one of these many hundred roads and streets that constitute the

body of Shanghai, where the first Chinese women's newspaper opened its office, the first women's school opened its classes, the first women's

urban performing arts troupe opened its evening shows, and the first

women's association opened its congregations and rallies in the modern

history of a transforming China. Shanghai Women, in this sense, is a

cinematic mobilization of a built environment as much as a humanly inhabited reconfiguration of the city, with its layered history and fluid

dynamics being released from the pasts as much as reshaped in the

present moments, disclosing rich, obscure, and resilient implications.

Significantly, it is on the banks of the Suzhou River, the site where Ah

Xia deliberates the questions of "who are you" and "what is home," where she shares with Mama a moment of mutual comprehension, a

moment that seems as long as Shanghai's history of being modern in its

endless variety. Mama for the first time lets her tears be seen by Ah Xia

as Ah Xia ends her last few moments of being an 18-year-old or renders

the content of her life over 18 years of time intelligible for the first time

to Mama: she has always been with Mama as the two have always lived

in a way distinct from the norms of social codifications of the junior and

the parental, therefore never lodged within the order of socially normalized hierarchy and its limiting temporality. Ah Xia holds Mama's

shoulders with her long arms: "Don't cry, Mama. Look that is a steam

ship!" "That is a tugboat," Mama cleans her tears, "that is not a steam

ship at all." "Mama, let's go home." The camera cuts to the final scene

of the film, which is a small room purchased by Mama with her small

salary and the amount of money taken from the property of her first

husband that the court granted to her after the divorce. Ah Xia and

Mama are making arrangements in the room and making the room into a

piece of artwork. Let it be noted here that, on the one hand, this small

room is on the third floor of a crowded building within a crowded



104 Haiping Yan

neighborhood made in usual Shanghai style, much like the other

apartments filmed earlier. On the other hand, the building is located at

the intersection between a busy street and the bank of the still busier

Suzhou River, with a small open balcony that is indexed as a passage all

the way up to the sky as well as a connection with the streets and the

flowing river water all the way down, a specific configuration of a "home"

that is connotatively a space of freedom and possibilities with humanly

figured and transfiguring dynamics. The sound track floods the small

room as if flowing through the home scene in the film, with all kinds of

streets sounds. The "coming of age" narrative of the literary story that

Shanghai Women engages is at the same time remade with audiovisual

forces that, instead of leading toward and culminating in a usual closure

a la "the state of maturity" governed by a developmental telos, open up and bring into focus all sorts of imageries of urban fluidity including streets short or long, winding lanes of residential units, riverside corners

or walkways, big or small shops and stores, buses and bus stops, public

playgrounds and intersections of crossroads, whereby turning points in

human life transpire to respacialize the interior scenes of domestic crises

with imageries of public urban places, and re-render the narrative of

interiority central to the "coming of age" literature into dynamic motions

impregnated with socially active and activating connotations.

Aesthetically, such a respacialization of a literary becoming gives rise to

an intermedial telescoping that engages with, works through, and moves

beyond the psychologized genre of individuation and its teleological

pressures of normality in life ordering, as well as concomitant ideas of

property, rubrics of family, and patterns of behavior. Designative of the

genre of "adaptation films" that leverage "coming of age" literature, which has become a fast-growing industry in and of itself particularly since the 1990s,9 Shanghai Women utilizes the domestic scenes of

"Turning Seventeenth" as a narrative instance of individuation, while at the same time working through the "home question" raised therein and

opening it up with dynamic audiovisual activations of the human

geographies of the city, as deeply shifting force fields pregnant with or

generative of multiple possibilities of human relations.

2. Amid Urbanizing Moment: Still Life Such cinematic rendition, as an intermedial telescope evocative of built environments in sync with humanly inhabited spatiality,10 takes on a



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home，’ in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 105

significantly enlarged scope in Still Life 三峽好人 ’ a film of epic proportions

produced in 2006, where the “home question" in relation to "the city" is

similarly registered and differently configured.11 Directed by Jia Zhangke 賈樟柯，Still Life traces large mutations of China's physiognomies, human

and otherwise, with its focus on the regions deployed for the Three

Gorges Dam project 長江三峽水利工程，a grand engineering project emblematic of the country's drive for modernity, the conception of

which is traceable to the first decades of the twentieth century. Once

accomplished, the dam is expected to revolutionize China's systems of

flood control, production of hydroelectric power, and shipping, with

immense economic gains. The project has been championed by all of the

leading Chinese political figures, from Sun Zhongshan 孫中山 in 1919 to

Mao Zedong 毛澤東，Zhou Enlai 周恩來，and Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平

throughout the PRC's history and, after intense debates over the decades,

finally approved by the People's Congress in 1992.12 Approximately 108

minutes long, the film unfolds a radical respatialization of a land and its

inhabitants, fraught with tensions, conflicts, uncertainties, and social

valuations in motion. Fengjie, one of the ancient cities established during the Han dynasty (AD 25) in the eastern part of the largest urban center

of southwestern China, namely, the Chongqing metropolis, struggles in

the thick of such respatialization and serves as the center of gravity in

the film: Shaped by 2,000 years of history, a node of high importance for

classical Chinese architecture, and the nerve center of sensorial memory in

classical Chinese literary culture and contemporary imagination,13 Fengjie is required to disappear in two years to make way for the implementation of the Three Gorges Dam project, resulting in the demolition of architec

ture and human migrations that affect more than 1.4 million lives from

within the Chongqing metropolis alone, and more lives from 20 districts,

municipalities, and counties across Hubei province,14 involving both

rural and urban populations. As multitudes are displaced, the social

patterns of their lives are dislodged, as is the moral fabric of their

relational existences. Han Sanming 韓三明，a coal miner coming to the

city of Fengjie from Shanxi province, travels through and witnesses as

much as struggles to inhabit such a land in its critical moment.

The film opens with a pan across a steamboat coming to the Three

Gorges region, carrying a full load of passengers, mostly male migrant workers in search for jobs. Then a series of medium to extreme close-ups

variably delineates their various body configurations and facial features, as if issuing a mobile painting or an extending panoramic photograph,



106 Haiping Yan

thereby bringing into focus of an image constellation of what has

become the largest human migration in contemporary history across

China. The camera's focal point finally centers on Han Sanming, sitting at the rear of the steamboat with one bundle of luggage on his knees:

brownish, sturdy, rugged, silent, a migrant worker in the thick of labor

migration. Another scene cuts in that shows he is partly induced and

partly coerced by a youngster of obscure identity into a room on the boat

where "lessons for making a good living" are being offered: the "teacher"

is a magician and begins with the enunciation that "people are drifting on water and everyone depends on the U.S. dollar." He then performs a

magic trick to turn white paper into euros and from euros to renminbi. His gang, meanwhile, is forcing the audience to "pay fees" for such

"know-how." The ringleader of the gang, the same youngster, takes

Han's luggage by force and turns threatening when he finds nothing valuable after a search. Han makes a swift move: He springs open his

knife to put the youngster at a distance and quickly turns around and

disappears. The camera chases his disappearance out of the room and the

steamboat, captures him again as he walks, slowly, up the steps of a

long and broad stairway made of strips of boulders, the signature of the ancient paths made across the region. A slower pan follows to show the

stairway leading to the old city gate of Fengjie up on the hills, indexing the modulating mountains as the backbone of the city and the Yangtze River at the foot of the mountains as the extension and outreach of the

city flowing toward the East Sea, framing the "mountain city," as

Fengjie was named at the time it was built and standing over time,

evoking the general features of the Chongqing metropolis, the Three

Gorges region, and the entire Yangtze River basin of China, with a

geo-cultural and eco-humanist specific ethos. Han Sanming walks one

step after another, on the stone-built stairway, up the hill, toward the

city. Unlike others landing here searching for jobs, he holds an address in hand that was left by his ex-wife, a Fengjie local, who left him with their newborn daughter, 16 years ago.

Han Sanming pays a motorcyclist to drive him to the birthplace of his ex-wife, only to discover flooding of the river there. Within the areas

designated as phase 1 of the dam project, the residential locale has

already gone under water as scheduled: "All people here have long been relocated and moved away," the motorcyclist tells Han Sanming, matter

of-factly. Han heads for the government office in charge of building demolition and resident relocation in the hopes of finding information



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of ‘‘Home’’ in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 107

about his ex-wife. He finds there a broken-down computer system in the

office and anxious crowds caught in confused arguments in the hallways.

Realizing that he has to rely on himself for his search, Han Sanming rents a room in a small inn on a street corner within the area designated as phase 3 of the dam project. Owned by a local elderly man, the inn has

a grand name, Guest House of the Great Tang People 唐人閣客，15 suggesting its long history (since the Tang dynasty) even as it caters to travelers cognizant of being as transitory as the inn, with its imminent vanishing. As the Chinese

character for “cigarette’’ appears on the screen, evoking a culturally specific mode of friendly exchange, a continuity cut shows Han Sanming

handing the owner of the inn a cigarette of a Chinese brand popular

among migrant workers since the early 1980s, a token of good will for

possible help among common folks. A pullback shot ensues, revealing the scene as the elderly owner's bedroom plus office, with an old televi

sion set showing a Hong Kong television drama about the underworld in

Hong Kong, a hit in the 1980s. Glued to the screen of the television set

is the third man in the room，who is none other than the youngest member of the gang on the steamboat from whom Han Sanming

escaped. Presenting himself as "Little Ma" /J、馬 and mimicking the style of the charismatic but tragically flawed gangster star in the Hong Kong TV drama series, the youngster proclaims that this area is his territory and under his command. Ignoring the film on television, Han acknowl

edges Little Ma by also offering him a cigarette. Little Ma lights it up with a scrap of Chinese newspaper in the same way the mafia boss does, full of air of the rich and powerful, except in the Hong Kong TV drama

it is with a $100 U.S. bill with which the mafia head lights his exquisite

cigar. A world featured by a broken system of official information, threatened by dissipating communities or public order, is hereby also

revealed as a breeding ground for the displaced of all sorts who feed on

misidentifications with simulations of unregulated wealth and power, coded in American cash, euros, and renminbi. All is caught in a flux of

an organized disorder where the logic of cash nexus threatens to prevail. And the magnitude of such a disorder shows in the next scene when Han

Sanming, after learning from the inn owner the whereabouts of the elder

brother of his ex-wife, walks through the crowded, chaotic streets of the

city toward the Yangtze River. The camera takes a long shot from his

back that frames his moving body with a growing field of discontinuity in the making: under his feet and all around him are piles of debris in

the wake of demolished and half demolished buildings, the extensive



108 Haiping Yan

escalating scale of which is measured by a receding human figure in a

seemingly unattainable search for the long-disappeared indispensables in

his life, a figure of the homeless in a time featured by a rapid

decomposition of formed environment, along with human formations or

historically developed valuations of all beings and relations involved

therein.

When Han Sanming reaches a pier along the river bank and finds

Old Ma 麻老大，the elder brother of his ex-wife, his search appears further futile. The master of a cargo ferry, Old Ma is indifferent about

Han's attachment to his ex-wife and daughter or human attachment

itself. In a few words, Old Ma makes it clear that he cares nothing about

this business of sentiment, while one of his employees, a youngster much like Little Ma whose head is wrapped with blood-oozing gauze

indicating violent fights, dashes at Han for another violent clash.

Departing, Han offers two bottles of wine he brought from Shanxi prov ince, his home, a culturally specific gesture to convey his sense of Old

Ma as a family. He receives downright rejection. “I have no feelings of

any kind for you," says Old Ma. “You are no relation. My sister's

daughter is not by you. Forget about your claims." The Chinese char

acter for “wine’’ appears on and goes off from the screen, much like the

character "cigarette" in the earlier scene. While it remains unknown until

later in the film that Old Ma has made his sister the wife of another

ferry master as a payment for the debt he owns, it is clear by now that vehicles of good will for communication such as “home-made wine" and

"China-made cigarette" commonly used by most ordinary Chinese no

longer function in this Chinese city in transition. The ferry scene ends

by conjuring up a space of unmitigated logic of the cash nexus while

yielding a time of unmediated human alienation. Such a flux of alienation governed by the cash nexus seems to

require a suspension of the kind of people like Han Sanming whose attachments amount to an insistence on the imperative of making human connections in terms of mutual attachment beyond the operatives of immediate transactions. The city of Fengjie, a tropical location and the actual birthplace of Han's ex-wife, whose name, Yaomei 幺妹，means

"baby sister," as the youngest born in the family, appears to be caught in or actually becomes such a flux that shuns, negates, or demolishes

impulses for relational humanity. "Fengjie" as an image and force field is hereby denoted through the sequence with a connotation indicative of the troubling nature of the city as an idea and function. A site of




productive demolition inherent to and required by a grand design of

economic development-cum-systematic modernization, the city here

seems to turn into a deeply questionable force field or a field of question itself. The city image discussed earlier, as an intermedial space pregnant with and generative of humanly enabling social possibilities in relation

to the "home question" beyond the rule of gendered individuation a la

normalizing telo-interiority, which is dynamically telescoped and opened

up in Shanghai Women, is in the danger of appearing as a cinematic

fantasy, and of an impotent kind at that.16 The sense of a city lost is so

strongly suggested herein that much critical discussion of Jia Zhangke and "the sixth generation" in general has focused, over the years, on the

issues of "the vanishing city" as a trope for a socialist China, as part and

parcel of what is deemed an escalating project of modernity in a "post socialist" moment.17

It would be helpful to note that Still Life has another title in Chinese, Sanxia haoren (Good Persons of the Three Gorges Region). It is under

this title that the film was released in China. The question about titles in

translation aside for the moment, Good Persons of the Three Gorges

Region is a deliberate, expressive double of The Good Person of

Szechwan, one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century drama by Bertolt

Brecht, arguably the twentieth century's most important dramatist, and

indicates a self-consciously structural engagement with the world of the

real in the film similar to that of its evoked German author in drama.

Much like Brecht's Shen Teh, Han Sanming the good person does not

seem likely to survive well the flux of organized disorder, its inherent

indifference toward human attachment beyond the code of the cash

nexus, and its corruption of humanity. The world in a structured flux is

no place for such a good person to reside or to be at home. Shen Teh

has to mask herself as her cousin Shui Ta to deal with the real on its

own terms, and is therefore caught in the danger of becoming

indistinguishable from all the forces that are fundamentally if not

violently alien to Shen Teh herself. With an exterior reading informed

by Brecht's Marxist persuasion, one might infer that the other and

logically necessary way of overcoming such a predicament is a structural

revolution. One can argue that it is with a desire for such a revolution

that Brecht sets his drama in a remote or mythological place called

Szechwan in China, whose presence in Brecht's imagination is defined

by some prominent critics as "Brecht's China dimension" involving an

alienation effect and a Hegelian-Marxian revolutionary dialectic.18



110 Haiping Yan

For the Chinese filmmaker and his Chinese audiences, "Szechwan"

marks out an actual place present in China. The city's name is spelled as

"Sichuan" today, it is the largest province in the southwest, and its

centerpiece is the Three Gorges region.19 Good Persons of the Three

Gorges Region, otherwise titled in English as Still Life, focuses on and

unfolds "a some place elsewhere" in Brecht's dramatic vision with a full

self-awareness of its present actuality in the heart of the world so

focused and unfolding. In short, "elsewhere" is the very constitution of

the here and now. While this place of present actuality is indexed at one

level as in a flux of cash nexus and human alienation, Brecht's drama of

alienation effect with dialectic impetus is firmly engaged insofar as its

implied logic is to be distinctively refunctioned. Han Sanming does not

split into a destiny of a binary composed of the positive versus negative in the way that "the good person" in Brecht's drama splits herself into

two figures of Shen Teh versus Shui Ta. Such a split binary posits a

dialectic logic implicating a sublimating temporal beyond, thereby the

authentic plenitude of humanity fulfills, a "global imaginary of identity"

transpires.20 In a troubling moment of history as Jia Zhangke's film

seems to evoke without the assurance of the Hegelian logic, the

prevailing feature of which is a discursive receding if not emptying of

such a temporal beyond, the dialectic binary may preserve itself, as some

critics have argued by resolving to assert its "authentic self' as the

willingly sacrificial, a historical drama becoming untimely, a self-aware

passion inherent to the twentieth century and indicative of its "post

twentieth-century" predicament all at once.21 This however is not the line

of logic that the film takes. In a dialogical engagement with such a genre of passion a la drama of the historical dialectic,22 Han Sanming exceeds

its limits and remains in rather than moves beyond the city in radical

change, continuing his search in the life here and now rather than

vanishing, a good person who turns himself into a dramatically evoca

tive and cinematically active lens, a human telescope that searches the

debris of the demolished and dislocated, discovers elements of relational

humanity on, underneath, in the midst of and across a growing or

expanding field of transition, and re-denotes its connotation by such

search and discovery. He takes a job in the building demolition business

and, along with other migrant workers on site, becomes an enduring and

sustaining human texture inherent to this particular process of an other

wise generalizable instance of productive destruction, recurring in various versions throughout modern times. A Han Sanming, stripped to




the waist with all muscles shown, exerting himself at work amid piles of

debris as his way of surviving a world of flux, punctuated by a Han

Sanming in his dark blue work clothes searching through the city and

the entire region for the indispensables in his life, inhabits more than

one-third of the cinematic space and its temporal duration, variably framed by a vast flowing river and a modulating range of mountains.

Such a figure of a migrant worker, indexically mobilized through a

deployment of the cinematic including tracking shots, medium and long shots, close-ups, deep focus, and all kinds of operations of a subjective camera at a new level of sophistication reached by Chinese filmmakers

in the 21st century, meanwhile, is laden with a vocabulary of the

working class and its historical valuation as established in twentieth

century Chinese revolutionary dramas. Here is the signature of an inter

medial aesthetic, a tension-driven and transgenre doubling, which marks

Jia Zhangke as one of the most innovative directors in contemporary Chinese cinema, inhabiting the agonies of a China at once struggling and

flourishing in the 21st century, while poignantly aware of his own

historical attachment in need of working through as resources for the "good

persons" in the present world of actuality. In one of the most suggestive

scenes, Han Sanming and Little Ma, after Han rescues the youngster who is badly beaten and treats him a drink, become "brothers." One

learns of the life of a vagrant local teenager, turning 18, with a heart not

at all set on the magic or logic of the business of the underworld. The

other learns of the life of a migrant coal miner from Shanxi, a faraway land up in the north, with a mind that firmly keeps the memories of the

past while intensely focusing on the presently living. Han's ex-wife "baby sister" was abducted by a human trader from here and sold to him there,

across three provinces. After sharing her sorrows with her empathetic

"good-hearted" "Shanxi husband," "baby sister" found her way of

returning "home," with their daughter. Han Sanming, carrying within

him the indispensable attachment to the mother and daughter, hopes to

know they are managing "at home" in their life, here and now. Little Ma

and Han Sanming, now eye-to-eye brothers, exchange their cell phone numbers. When Han's cell phone receives a call from Little Ma, the cell

begins to ring a musical piece, which is the melody of the theme song from a popular television drama series. Made in the 1980s and broadcast

in 1990, this series tells the stories of two families spanning the periods of the 1950s and the 1960s including the Cultural Revolution, with

reflective attachment to and critical affirmation of, in particular, an ethic



112 Haiping Yan

of care offered by a working-class family and its generous members.

The song is titled “Blessing Good People," the good working people at

the time and over time:23

How many things past / as if still just yesterday / how many friends one had /

as if still nearby / Once feeling truly and deeply / now encounters it, real or

unreal? / raising our glasses, wishing the good persons travel well / close and

distant / all are in connection / such feelings of caring / is the heat of this

world.

Little Ma's cell also plays the melody of a theme song of a Hong

Kong-produced television drama highly popular in China in the 1980s, a

tale of Shanghai of the 1930s, The Bund 上海灘：24

Flowing waters / pounding waters / the river waves run towards infinity / it

surges through our lives / it carries away our woes.

As the original sound track of the song takes the cue of Little Ma's

cell and rises, the camera closes upon the two migrants having drinks

and zooms in on a television screen where a live news program is

showing a woman in her 80s being carefully helped to step onto an oil

ship, full of locals of all age groups, genders, and walks of life, leaving the region. A rural woman in her mid-20s is holding the mast tightly,

wailing soundlessly. Of all the television screens with their various scenes that appear in Still Life, this cinematic "citation" of the television

is singularly unique and generally indicative in that the scene on televi sion is an actual moment of an actual live news report by Sichuan Tele

vision Studio in 1997，promoting "the patriotic spirit" with which “great people of the Three Gorges Region leave their homes to re-establish their lives elsewhere in the service of the great development of the

country as a whole."25 The camera quickly shifts away from this footage of an actual live news report to return to its own cinematic world as it

were, taking a long shot of a group of working people running and then

standing on the receding shores, waving their hands and clothes, sending blessings. A deep focus ensues, sustains, and expands, within which an oil ship, indexed as the same ship that is shown in the actual footage of the live news report cited in the preceding close-up, is moving east on the Yangtze River into the distance, passing mountains along the banks,

leaving behind the line “Phase Three Water Level: 156.3M" written on a

plastic board mounted on the receding hills. Han Sanming the migrant worker is stripped to his waist, an image recurring in the chapters of



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of ‘‘Home” in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 113

contemporary Chinese arts of different genres and contemporary Chinese

history of different versions, staying on and standing still at a pier

looking at the horizon between the river and the sky, while exceeding all

the familiar boundaries of those chapters: a still life amid and beyond ordered times, an intermedial telescope, the aesthetic signature of Jia

Zhangke cinema.

The camera shifts its focus upward, as Han Sanming slowly looks

up, to a high angle, and captures an entity of unidentifiable identity

flying across the sky, unknown, suggestive of the unidentifiable nature

of the time and space so framed at the same time.26 A crosscut ensues to

bring into focus another person in the Three Gorges region of Sichuan

province, in China in transition, also looking at the unknown moving across the sky: Shen Hong 沈紅，an urban woman from the city of

Taiyuan in the north, travels here to see her husband, a worker at a state

owned factory in Fengjie, who has not visited her at home for two years.

Upon arrival, Shen Hong finds that the factory has been sold to a busi

nesswoman from the coastal regions of the south. The transaction seems

to have included everything in the factory except the workers who must

manage to find their livelihoods on their own, elsewhere. After a series

of attempts, Shen Hong gets hold of a friendly middle-aged woman who

is the “president of the workers' union" here,27 and learns that her

husband Guo Bin 高斌 has long left and “is said to be doing well out

there," and has left some of his personal belongings here waiting to be

collected. A crosscut leads to an unused production workshop where

Guo Bin worked. While the union president tries to open his rusted

locker without success, Shen Hong is shown, in a pullback shot and a

long shot, to be standing still, in this enlarging-cum-emptying place left

with ragged working gloves, rusted machines, and machine parts. When

Shen Hong finally breaks open the locker with a hammer, she discovers

a pile of dusty items including work IDs made with red plastic covers, blurred and worn out, suggesting a bygone traditional manufacturing

industry, its institutional community, and constitutive social relations. A

close-up signifies a bag of tea amid the items, its brand, Mountain

Clouds of the Wu Regions 巫山雲霧，the classical literary name for the

mountains of the Three Gorges region.28 Shen Hong pauses and retrieves

it. The Chinese character of "tea" appears on the screen, as the lone

ethos of a Shen Hong lost in thought saturates the cinematic space. A

fade-out leads to a shot of a young woman standing at the bank of the

river, a point to be picked up later. The next scene shows Shen Hong



114 Haiping Yan

sitting at a table outside a convenience store at the riverside, still

thinking. Slowly, she takes a mouthful from her bottled water and puts the bottle down, then takes the tea bag out from her handbag and pours a large portion of the tea leaves into an empty glass cup, gazing at the

glass. Time, much like the camera, carefully stops, stands still, waits.

Shen Hong reseals the tea bag and puts it back into her handbag, rises, and leaves. A series of tracking shots is employed, framing the body of

Shen Hong in motion. She walks, constantly and step-by-step, as if care

free in overall motion and yet intrinsically heavy in each step, with a

bottle of water in hand. Like Han Sanming, she encounters people on

her way; unlike Han Sanming, she does not pay much attention to those she encounters, such as the young woman who appears in the riverside

shot mentioned earlier. As Shen Hong walks by, the young woman calls out to her, anxiously, "Elder sister, you must come from other places. Would you help me find a job, domestic maid or. . . "How old are

you?" Shen Hong asks. "Sixteen," comes the answer. "How very young you are." Shen Hong walks by, leaving her remark behind to the young woman, just as she left that portion of tea behind, in a dry glass cup on a table of a shop in an area marked "phase 3" of the dam project.

Tea, tea making with heated water, and tea sharing constitute a vehicle of human communication central to the liveliness of community in any formations since ancient China in the regions along the Yangtze River, indispensable in greeting friends, welcoming guests, presenting gatherings private or public, making acquaintances, or making daily dwellings called "homes."29 Unlike the normally male-gendered func tions of "wine" and "cigarette" appearing earlier in the film with Han

Sanming, "tea" a la tea culture can be gender neutral in Chinese tradi tion.30 It may be incidental that China's tea culture originated in the

southwest, the heartland of which is the Three Gorges region, also called the Wu regions, as evinced in historical-cum-archeological records since the Huangdi period (4000 BC), among others.31 It is not incidental that in the film Shen Hong carefully retrieves the "tea of the Wu regions" abandoned by a male hand and takes it with her while leaving a portion of it at its birthplace on the shore of the ancient river that has been

flowing since ancient times, a gift to passing travelers of the world in need of warm tea-cum-the warmth of community. From the moment she

appears, Shen Hong is a woman without tea to make or share. She walks with her bottled cold water, drinking from it periodically, denoting a state of mental concentration of a peculiar sort that looks like



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of "Home，，in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 115

absentmindedness in intense motion, the nature of which reveals itself

through the unfolding of the Shen Hong episode in the film. The specific

plot is clear enough: Shen Hong finds Dongmin 東明，her husband's old

friend from his early days in the army, and embarks on a strenuous

search for her husband. After much abortive attempts, the man turns up himself. The two walk together while passing under something high up in the air like a giant overpass, which is actually the foundation of a

newly finished navigation beacon tower spanning the broad street on the

shore, which is part of “phase 3” and extends to the middle of the river.

People gather in this place of novelty on the edge of change, dancing in

couples with music playing from an old cassette. A medium shot ensues

in which the man invites Shen Hong to dance. In the middle of the

music melody, Shen Hong stops and tells the man that she has decided

to divorce: “I have another man." They stop dancing. Shen Hong walks

away, leaving her husband behind.

The unspoken truth throughout all the above is of course that Guo

Bin, the husband, has been seeing “another woman," a businesswoman

who is the current owner of the sold and privatized factory where he

used to work. He has been busy working for his boss's business for the

past two years, ‘‘doing well," as was known to everyone including the

"president of the workers' union," Dongmin, and in fact Shen Hong herself. Shen Hong knows that her relationship with her husband is over, with or without confirmation or information. A Shen Hong walking in a

state of mental concentration with bottled cold water across the Three

Gorges region along the Yangtze River, rather than a figure in the

manner of Han Sanming searching for indispensables amid a flux of the

unknown, seems an embodiment of a stalemate in need of working

through in order for her body and mind to move beyond, to effect an

arrival, for a certain decision to transpire. Significantly, the melody that

carries and connotes her dance with the man who has long left her is

from the theme song of a film about the Three Gorges region released in

1980，titled When Leaves Turn Red on the Mountains 等到滿山紅葉時：32

Red leaves across the mountains are like moving clouds in sunlight /

illuminate Three Gorges year after year / illuminating red clouds / are no

comparison to my baby sister / radiant / standing on the mountain cliff.

Red leaves in hands / baby sister looks for my elder brother / the light in my

heart / Elder brother is the water flowing over the oars / I am the oars that

play in the water / Red leaves in hands / the light in baby sister's heart.



116 Haiping Yan

The film, of the same title as its theme song, tells the story of the

emotional life of a female third officer on a passenger ship in the

regions. In 1947 at age two, she was rescued from a sinking boat by a

signal man directing ships at the gorges and his son, a seven-year-old

boy. After the old man died, the “elder brother” took over his father's

job to make a living and bring up his "baby sister." Brought up in the

newly founded People's Republic of China, the baby sister became a

college student and graduated from the Academy of Aviation. The

attachment between the baby sister and her elder brother deepens into

love despite the social and economic differences between them, the

former a college graduate in the city and the latter with no formal educa

tion working as a signal man at the gorges. After the elder brother

drowned in a flood while protecting the buoy channel marker signal

light, the baby sister, who now works on a passenger boat as a prom

ising ship pilot on track to become an officer, remains single for many

years. She loves red leaves, nature's signature of the Three Gorges

region, which is also, in her eyes, the vision of her elder brother. The

theme song is the musical signature of her as a woman of "enduring human attachment" refusing the social categories that divide lives.

An otherwise mediocre or cliche film of the most common kind of

PRC ideological hallmarks a la the often moralizing promotion of

equality among different social classes, Red Leaves 紅葉 registers a

historically crucial turning point一China in the late 1970s一fraught with

volatile tensions: As the Cultural Revolution ended and the Reform Era

began, the so-called "sent-down youth，，in rural China were permitted to

return to their birthplaces, the cities, each in the ways he or she could or

would manage, as adults turning middle aged. Many relationships estab

lished in their youthful years including “love relations” were thereby set adrift. Believers in “love beyond social hierarchies" found themselves

caught in a testing time, a flux of redefinition. Often enough, those who returned to the cities earlier than their peers severed their attachments to

their "lovers,"33 or legal wives and husbands if they were married, and their children if they had children.34 Often as well, the returnees reshuf fled their "attachments" among themselves or made various surgeries of their "love" life as they sought out or fought for their places of rebe

longing in a society amid a drastic turning in terms of its institutional articulations and grounding logic.35 The story of the female third officer, which begins in the "old society" in 1947 and unfolds in "new China"

since 1949，is framed by another story in Red Leaves precisely about




such crises of the sent-down youth: A woman returnee to a city is on her

way to becoming a film star while growing contemptuously dissatisfied

with her fiance, also a returnee who finds a job merely as a waiter on

the same ship where the female third officer works.

Red Leaves, made in 1980, predictably ends with a restabilizing conclusion made possible by the yet-to-be film star learning the right values: she learns from her fiance's colleague, the third officer who is

actually the prototype of the fictional character she is supposed to act in

her debut film, the value of enduring human attachment, and happily continues her relationship with the "ambitionless" service worker. The

problematic coded in the double stories in Red Leaves, however, remains

in the cinematic realm as in the realms of the social, in a rapidly

changing China where the tensions between the desires for social

mobility and needs for relational humanity as valuations in conflicts are

escalating 100-fold faster than the decades of real time in passing. The

transtemporal music citation of Red Leaves in the figure of a dancing Shen Hong in Still Life, 26 years later, suggests as much. The aesthetic

working out of the intermedial scene here, meanwhile, does not follow

the contrived plotting of Red Leaves', neither does it abandon the feel

ings of and for relational humanity captured therein, beyond a real or

potential state of affairs where "in came calculation, out went feeling," as the author of Utopia characterized it, in a moment we might think of

as seminal in modern history.36 Red Leaves captures such feelings as an

exponent of the driving energies inherent in the economic reform since

the late 1970s and the early 1980s, as some have recently argued.37 One

may also argue that the real movement in the dance scene in Still Life decades later is leveraged on the emotional energy of the Red Leaves

melody, just as the connotations of the melody are revisited and resigni fied by a dancing Shen Hong in the thick of and at odds with an

immensely intensifying economic drive that threatens to be the single

governing force in China or the world of the 21st century. An instance

of intermediation, the cited melody of Red Leaves facilitates the

in-coming strength that Shen Hong has been generating with her body and mind throughout her walking across the Three Gorges region in

order to confront her own stalemate, namely a disavowal of the "already

known," and to recognize it as the humanly unacceptable. Her agony embedded in such a disavowal can be thereby actively rendered into an

impetus for a different mode of being. Shen Hong ends the Shen Hong

episode in Still Life by precisely such an active rendering over, an act of



118 Haiping Yan

decision making that is also moving beyond the bygones in her life to

rebegin, in history, with and for her-story, her place in history. Such an impetus also carries and fuels the final portion of Still Life

where Han Sanming reappears. A crosscut returns to the migrant worker, who is persistent in and indeed insists on his search. Time passes, and

space alters, as indicated in the nonstop demolition of the buildings in

the areas including the inn where he stays. The elderly owner of the inn,

carrying his poster of "Guest House of the Tang People"唐人閣客 with

him, migrates to and settles in a cave on the large pier of an arch-shaped

bridge at the outskirts of the city, perhaps temporarily or possibly indefi

nitely if the bridge is located beyond the areas of all the “phases.，，Han

Sanming finds another place but still goes to pay the old man visits,

bringing him some last rent payments and good wishes for "the house

warming." To be and to be a persistent and connective live element amid

a flux of human migration, Han turns into a trope for home search that

is a locus of relational humanity in the moment of actualization itself

through questioning a questionable city and setting “the city question" in

motion. It has been much noted that, far more visibly than in Shanghai Women, scenes in Still Life are shot with and through an actual city, the

city of Fengjie. It is helpful to point out that the body of the city is so

centrally filmed and deployed that it affords the cinematic substantive

forces of a built environment in the midst of drastic unraveling as well

as redefinition, a grounding set up for massive change. Following Han

Sanming in a city of demolition, in other words, the camera turns into a

humanly inhabited telescope that embraces every inch of the body of the

city and the regions and reproduces it into a field of intensive change without ready-made scripts. In constant making and remaking, the

dynamics of a humanly animated flux exceeds the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic and brings the unsuspendables into focus and grounds their refocused energies. Han Sanming revisits Old Ma. Old Ma softens and

agrees to provide information about the “baby sister.，，"When?" Han

Sanming asks. "When viable," Old Ma answers. Han Sanming stays on, works, and searches. Han Sanming searches, works, and stays on. The immanent intensity of such unbreakable continuity sharpens amid daily ongoing discontinuity, which is crystallized in the death incident of Little Ma. In the earlier scene where Han Sanming and Little Ma become brothers over drinks, Little Ma listens to the Han Sanming life

story but cannot hear it, incapable of recognizing the live content of a lived history as an active impetus of and for human attachment. He tries



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home’，in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 119

to grasp such live content by using what is available to him, namely, the

cant of commercial cinema circulating on a global market via Hong

Kong and Taiwan products and penetrating via the multiplying tele

routes the remotest corners of the world, and defines such impetus as

“nostalgic.，，“We are too nostalgic," he comments, with exaggerated

gestures mimicking the stars in those films of mafia bosses. Han

Sanming first asks with a trace of smile, "Where have you gotten this

big word, ‘nostalgia，？，，And, without waiting for Little Ma to answer, he

adds the single longest sentence he has uttered in the film: "One's own

matters, no way to simply forget about it." A Han Sanming in and as

Still Life is as much about the time that is passed or passing as the live

space that has stayed and stays in the present history. A teenage vagrant born at the end of the 1980s, Little Ma has yet to live and see a live

content of his own taking place in history. Charging around as head of a

small gangster ring under the instructions of some men of power whose

identity is obscure and whose power seems to be multiplying, Little Ma

one day disappears. Han Sanming, who has promised Little Ma another

drink, waits in a small shop. Time slows down. Han Sanming rings Little Ma's cell phone. Time stands still. A melody arises somewhere, the theme song of The Bund, muffled. Han Sanming walks in the direc

tion of the sound and stops at a huge pile of debris: the music continues,

right here and now. Han Sanming and other migrant workers immedi

ately start digging. Little Ma's body shows, smashed, one of the

suspended. The following shots unfold a ritual of burial that Han

Sanming and the workers provide for this life that has barely lived,

concluding with a medium shot wherein Han Sanming sits looking at the

picture of a Little Ma smiling, and a long shot wherein Han Sanming sees off a boat carrying the dead moving away from the shore into

distance on the river, evoking a Han Sanming who must stay on, cannot

stay on, will stay on, and does stay on in a continuous search for the

indispensable in "one's own matters," a continuity in life or in death,

being alive or being dead, an immanent in being and becoming, as a

multilayered environment cinematically revealed, a world of layered

history humanly re-embodied.

A crosscut issues a cell phone ring as if from the other end of life

and death, which is from Old Ma, with information about the “baby sister." Han Sanming and Ma Yaomei 麻幺妹 finally meet, after 16 years of separation. A crosscut shows Sanming sitting with Yaomei's current

husband, the owner of a shipping ferry, learning how Yaomei was the



120 Haiping Yan

payment to the ship master as an equivalent to the amount of the 30,000

renminbi, Old Ma's debt. An agreement is quickly reached. Han

Sanming will pay the amount, with his entire income in the coming year. A close-up cuts in where Sanming and Yaomei look at their daughter's

photo; then a point-of-view shot leads to a close-up on the young woman

of 16, standing in a blue-color working uniform, facing the camera and

smiling, with an entrance of a new factory in the background. Marking out another temporality of migrant workers moving across contemporary China, her tender figure vibrates with her parents' hard "pasts" while her

smile links them and shifts the implications of their lives, a differential

continuity made with contiguity cuts transpires here, suggesting a

connective and connectable times.38 The following scene crystallizes all

these contiguity cuts with their dynamics of repetition and change. Yaomei and Sanming squat face-to-face on a floor in the middle of a

building in the process of being demolished. With all its upper floors

and the four walls already gone, the place appears to be a fragile frame

work of a total opening in a momentary pause, in space as in history. Yaomei affords this pause a human content of differential but connective

relations by offering Sanming a toffee of the most popular and appreci ated brand—White Rabbits—among all ordinary Chinese throughout PRC history to today. It will help us to remember here that the produc tion of White Rabbits started in the 1940s, reached its zenith in the

1950s, and has been particularly flourishing since the reform in the late

1970s, and how such a genealogy constitutes a significant dimension of

continuity in modern and contemporary Chinese history that weaves into

Still Life and the thick of its complexity.39 There is something intimately tender and profoundly indicative in the scene where Sanming takes a bite of it and gives the other half back to Yaomei. The Chinese character of "toffees" appears on the screen and stays until the end of this scene,

leaving on the screen the quiet taste of sweet nurturing, gentle sharing, and indeed feelings of love and being loved often associated with child hood and the early years of the People's Republic in particular, as well

as with the finest fabrics of contemporary Chinese life as a whole.

Buildings all around are collapsing bit by bit, making huge sounds of

implosions. The strength of White Rabbits stays in their taste, while

nurturing their bodies a la their physiological and psychic constitutions: Yaomei and Sanming arise and turn around to look at directly and to be in the thick of the historical ruptures in the making, redefining the nature of their relationship across the past, present, and future, as a lived and




living landscape of relational humanity amid ruptures. "At the begin

ning, I thought I was telling a story about search," Jia Zhangke says in

an interview. "After I finished it I realized that the film is about making decisions."40

Such "decisions," inherently exceeding the dialectic of the dramatic

genre, do not constitute closure, temporally or spatially. The film ends

with an evocation of the great migration across the land of China, with

"decisions" being made involving critical valuations about the human

implications of such migration and the social connotations of change in

modern times. Han Sanming and other migrant workers are going to

Shanxi province where coal miners are needed and receive better pay. He takes a long look at the Three Gorges region, his baby sister's home

a la birthplace, a locale where he and Yaomei redefine their relationship as much as themselves, an ethos carried within him as the migrant worker and a landscape of his own humanity made and remade in

migration,41 much like Shen Hong on a ship heading for Shanghai

carrying the tea with her from the heartland of its civilizational

birthplace. A multitude of humanity is on the move, by land or water

and, in other cinematic registers I have discussed elsewhere, through the

air or across the oceans. Passengers in life, the Sanmings, Shen Hongs,

baby sisters, past and present, 16-year-old daughters or teenage sons, the

able-bodied, or its countercategory, the disabled men and women of all

ages, passing by or passing into variably ranked cities along the shore of

the Yangtze River, migrating to larger cities by heading further toward

Guangdong province in the south, Shanxi province in the north, Liaoning

province in the far northeast, or traveling to different types of urban

centers or metropolises in the making in all locations such as Fengyang or Taiyuan, Dongguan or Xiameng, and Shanghai, the largest city in

China and the soon to be the largest in the world, where they will

encounter Ah Xia, her Mama, and others in Shanghai Women, all the

while moving across China in all directions in epic proportions, in search

of homes in a changing China embedded in all its intensive momentums

and problematic possibilities. Sounds and images taken from the past, remade in the present or imagined as energies of the future, Chinese or

otherwise, cinematic or otherwise, all merge into a deep focus of funda

mental intermediality whereby all can be radically dislocated, reevalu

ated, and persistently reactivated, designating that where these men and

women are is the Three Gorges region, and that where the Three Gorges

region is there are good people, as Still Life in a time and space amid



122 Haiping Yan

tumultuous change, as the embodied figures of home searching and

home making, as well as the insistent impetus for homecoming.

3. Full Circle: Inhabiting the Cities

As an enabling opening through which humanly active energy transpires, the city recurs in Peng Xiaolian's cinematic works, including the most

recent and acclaimed Kids in Shanghai (with its Chinese title My Strong Little Boat) in 2009, a story of home displaced and home regained again with more complex cross-cultural implications.42 As a flux of historical

force field whereby impetus for relational humanity persists and

sharpens, the city features in all of Jia Zhangke's films, including most

recently I Wish I Knew (with its Chinese title Marvels at Sea), a major release on the eve of the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition. When Peng Xiaolian and Jia Zhangke are brought into a constellation, we have an

unlikely differential that is a differential connective in meaning

productions of contemporary cinema. While different in their cinematic

engagements with the telo-literary (Peng) and the dialectic-dramatic (Jia),

Shanghai Women and Still Life resonate with each other in their trans

genre and intermedial evocations of the "the good" as social affirmatives, via their telescopic renditions of the impulses for relational humanity in

the thick of life of "the ordinary Chinese" in search of ways to inhabit

the present moment of history. Such renditions of "goods persons" are

as much about inhabiting the time of change as about taking place in a

spatial flux, or really about the occupation of a temporal, a process of

making a city of and for human mutuality. Questions can and do arise

about whether and to what degree such cinematic instances of humanly active energies illuminate or obscure the volatile conditions of "the real" off the silver screen.43 Transgenre and intermedial tropes of ultimately affirmative home searching, home making, and homecoming at work in

cases discussed above, in other words, can amount to mere mediations of an ideological nature by which the critical problems of the world of the real can be glossed over or written off. The transgenre intermedial can be another variation of the ideological. Such questions deserve further discussion and sustained analyses of a radically cross-disciplinary kind which are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say here as a brief conclusion that the transgenre and intermedial turn in contemporary Chinese cinema often works with a built-in reflexivity, a dynamic that is inherent in the above two cases and many more others, in the ways that



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home，’ in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 123

not only further enrich the transgenre and intermedial forces in question, but work through the constitutions of the tropes of home in their

cinematic life as well as in their actual implications in the material

lifeworld.

It has been much noted, reported, and traced that the leading character in Still Life is performed by the film director's cousin of the

same name. His actual name is Han Sanming indeed, just as his actual

cell number is the character's cell number in the film. The actual Han

Sanming is a coal miner in Fengyang, Shanxi province, just as the

character is in the film. Born in 1971，the actual Han Sanming has been

working as a coal miner since he was 18. Acting on film constitutes his

activities ‘‘after hours," engagements in a kind of "amateur" labor as it

were, upon the invitation of his film director cousin with some payment “better than that of a coal miner.’’ He is not on his way to become一

neither has he any intention of becoming—a “real’’ film actor. This is of

course the point in having him perform in the film.44 While arguments have been made about how “real’’ such an actual person can make the

film become or how precisely ‘‘made up" the film is as shown by the

presence of such actuality, the double-bodied dynamic implicated therein

makes effectively explicit that what is in the view and focus is an actual

body in transgenre and intermedial motion via the cinematic realm,

offering thereby a production of meaning with no claims on its natural

truthfulness, and a valuation formed amid landscapes of variable and

shifting images that invite active reflection.45 Lu Liping 呂麗萍，the

actress who plays Mama in Shanghai Women, also doubles in the film

with her own actual decision-making process in the lifeworld. While

filming and socially present as a respected public figure and a successful

professional woman, in the "private" domain she was working through the aftermath of her two “marital failures" as a mother with a teenage

child, struggling to navigate the force fields of social norms while

finding a way to make a "home" for herself and her loved ones.46 A

range of information about the actual Han Sanming and real-life Lu

Liping is made available for the public through a similarly wide range of

media including print interviews, newspaper reports, television talk

shows, Internet dictionaries, blogs, tweets, academic publications, and

the traditional ways that generate personal connections and sustain

mostly supporting communities, genre variable and local specific.47 Live

performance in intermedial cinema as part of the extending constellation

of intermedial communities, it seems, suggests the coming in of an era



124 Haiping Yan

of intermediality, wherein life transpires across the interdynamics of the

rapidly changing and growing media fields. Here every element

implicated is active and "affects, even if only slightly, the tensions, the

pressures, the very nature of the complication,"48 the scope and

magnitude of which, as well as the possibilities involved and engendered therein, are yet to be seen.

It seems pertinent to end this essay by making a note on Full

Circle 飛越老人院，a film that premiered in August 2012, provoking

emotionally charged public attention.49 Directed by Zhang Yang 張楊， another major artist in contemporary Chinese cinema, Full Circle traces

a series of playful and poignant turns of events at a nursing home for the

elderly named the Guanshan Residence 關山老人院 in a city in northern China. Coming from all walks of life, each of the 30 or so elderly arrives at the “home，，scene with various memories of a life "coming to

an end，” while being confronted with similar problems amid a rapidly changing society. Old Ge 老葛，for one, seems to have lost his place in

society and life after his retirement and the death of his second wife.

Socially and professionally irrelevant now, he is also being rejected by his newly wed biological son, who refuses his wedding gift along with

attempted emotional reconciliation and by his stepchildren who ousted him from his housing established with his second wife. Suffering in

silence, Old Ge succumbs to the idea of entering a "nursing home,"

barely managing his eruptive anger, sleeplessness, and a severe sense of

guilt. Old Gao, mentally disturbed, has lost all his former capabilities in

self-expression, except for one sentence: "We have given you all we have had, all of our life, and you return with nothing!" Lady Li 李老太太， whose husband died of unknown or forgotten reasons, is forgetting her own past, or present, or really her entire life, turning into a nonentity as it were whose unintelligibility in all eyes is both comic and strangely stirring, as well as awe-inspiring in peculiar moments. Ranging from their sixties to their nineties, these men and women encounter one another as they come to terms with what they seem to have shared: they are variously displaced if not coerced into this “home，，under the

category of “the elderly," while the world outside this “home for the

elderly" seems to be driven or speeding up in its strivings for immediate

wealth, unmitigated power, and something called time efficiency in the

pursuit of both. As cultural critics have observed and debated in the past decade or so, such strivings seem to have been increasingly made in

public discourses as “new” and hence future-claiming forces of “the




young" in contemporary China, while "the young" as a social category and value-laden orientation "points to the ascending supremacy of

individual-centric consumerism, intimating an alienation of social

production or society itself."50

The classification of human values and indeed humanity itself along the curve of biological age and the binary of "the young" and "the

elderly" is of course not novel but a fairly normal operation in modern

times, especially when one considers how well they pair with other

classified binaries such as the abled and disabled, the male and female, the productive and passive, the efficient and deficient, the cutting-edge and the backwater, the advanced and the backward, the valuable and the

valueless, which are all registered in Shanghai Women and Still Life, as

discussed earlier. The "home" for these "elderly" in other words

designates a state of human inactivity or devaluation, a placeless place in a society assigned to those, in terms much circulated in China today,

"goods out of favor" or "stocks without future." "The elderly" in this

sense are not so much the logical results of a "natural law" biologically claimed as they are human effects of a historically specific way of

organizing "biology" in sync with the logic of profit-centered instrumentalism, its schedules of productivity and nonproductivity, and

its concomitant bookkeeping calculations. What makes the occurrences

at Guanshan Residence in the film disturbingly "novel" furthermore is

not only how such logic seems to be invading all spheres of society and

life, but the ways in which these "futureless stocks" tend to be foreclosed

from the values of their own lived life after they "have given it all." In

the words of a film critic who is moved to tears by the film, "Guanshan

Residence drives home the most serious issue in China today, namely, how the elderly are presently losing their basic livelihood since the

safety networks for basic personal well being are glaringly lacking, a

dangerous situation particularly in the momentums of our economic

reform [where the policies on distribution and redistribution of social

wealth have been radically shifting]."51 In an interview on Still Life, Jia

Zhangke phrases his thoughts on the problem of social or really human

safety in more sweeping terms: "Here is the historical situation for us in

today's China: we can now pursue material wealth and strive to achieve

material success. China has become much more open to such activities

than it was before. During the process of reform, however, it seems that

material wealth has become the only measure for and sole value of life.

It looks as though one could well lose all the rest in such pursuits



126 Haiping Yan

including medical care for basic health and social security for old age or

all age if one did not seize immediate material gains or rob the available

resources. The whole society pounces and rushes at its prey."52 When

variously deemed "stocks without future"—the "elderly" is one register

among many—find themselves increasingly losing ground in such a

moment of "history" and turning placeless its order of values, "history" is hereby shown to be retrospectively constituted, indeed a temporalized structure of power relations monopolizing not only material wealth but

also the very allocation of human worth along with its social valuation.

This is likely to become or has already become one of the most

serious issues in contemporary China, which demands comprehensive

analyses beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say here that, as a

film about the problematic dislocation and possible re-creation of

human-centered scenarios for social development and sense of belonging amid historical flux, Full Circle registers an equally potent impetus in

the thick of the life of those "futureless": The designated elderly do not

remain quiet or stand still about life or history. A man named Old Zhou

i»l takes the lead and decides to inhabit his state of assigned inactivity with persistent enthusiasm for activities and ingenious ideas for

actualizing such enthusiasm. Knowing that his days are numbered due to

cancer, Old Zhou mobilizes himself and his fellow elderly to perform their own skits, articulate their own issues to themselves as well as

communicate with all the others. With his first magic solo show, Old

Zhou succeeds in working with fellow residents to mount various

experimental performances including shadow (puppetry) play, using

props invented with simple material at hand such as paper boxes, worn

hats, and painted facial masks. Each performance marks a clear instance in an increasing deviation from the role and the state of "the elderly," as each performer renders himself or herself more active through each instance. By the time they hold a meeting among themselves to make a decision to participate in the national TV competition for performing arts in the city of Tianjing, they have turned themselves into active artists

charting an uncharted route in their respective "full circles" of life while

reconfiguring the organizing principles of a society for its more imagina tive histories. They foil the measures taken by the medical team of the

nursing home to prevent them from taking any initiatives on their own,

successfully obtain a used bus, and, equipped with their skills well seasoned across all walks of life, move into an active journey beyond the limits of Guanshan Residence. The Chinese title of the film, Moving



Inhabiting the City: Tropes of “Home，，in Contemporary Chinese Cinema 127

Beyond the Home for the Elderly, crystallizes its central dynamic with

the longest scene in the film where the bus of "the elderly performers" is

moving at full speed on roads in open air, across regions, fields, hills, various divides, and boundaries of the order of human hierarchy between

the able and the disabled and the young and the old, a dynamic process

punctuated by singing and music, and sustained by improvisational

performances all the way. "The elderly" on move hereby evokes Ah Xia, the young, on her

bicycle moving across the city in Shanghai Women, and the migrant workers of all ages in Still Life moving across the towns, cities, and

metropolises of a fermenting China, remaking a connective sense of

social belonging with human-centered impetus to momentously inhabit

an otherwise uninhabitable moment of history. It is important and

significant that, resonating with Lu Liping the real-life mother and Han

Sanming the actual migrant coal miner as well as the extending communities gathered intermedially around them discussed earlier, those

featured in Full Circle constitute in the lifeworld a veritable army of

public cultural figures in China since 1949: Xu Huanshan 許還山，Wu

Tianming 吳天明，Cai Hongxian 蔡鴻翔，Wang Deshun 王德順，Tang Zuohui 唐佐輝，Li Bing 李濱，Tian Hua 田華，Guan Zongxiang 管宗祥， Tao Yuling 陶玉玲，Liu Jiang 劉江，Jia Fengsen 賈鳳森，Huang Suying

黃素影，Zhang Huaxun 張華勳，Jiang Hualin (late)江化霖，Zhong Xinhuo 仲星火，and more,53 these artists with their household names do

more than evoking the oeuvre of contemporary Chinese cinema in

particular and genealogies of various schools traceable throughout modern Chinese filmmaking as a whole. Time-tested carriers of the arts

and culture central to a society in the making and remaking, their

trajectories in life as on screen, span virtually all the tumultuous decades

of PRC history and denote some of the defining problematics as much as

transformational energies of an ancient country struggling in its

contemporary time for new destinies. Tian Hua's life story as a

legendary dynamic of revolutionary films and the Chinese revolution

since the 1940s and throughout the subsequent decades, Xu Huanshan，s

trials and tribulations as a condemned "rightist" since 1957 and his

artistic blossoming in the 1980s, and Wu Tianming，s ongoing "long march" in China and in the world as arguably one of the leading

pioneering reformers in and beyond the Chinese film industry since the

1980s to the present day, to name only a few, are deeply differential and

equally compelling exponents of a specific live passage in human



128 Haiping Yan

history, the scope and significance of which remain to be reckoned with

and likely in terms beyond the available lexicon of modern times. As

living depositories of a country in tumultuous changes over all these

decades, in other words, they bring together its past, present, and present potentialities called future, thereby embodying a constellation

emblematic of an at once ancient and young life called China, navigating in and as a world of irreducibly differential beings and becomings, immanently at odds with the ready-made ä la prevailing logic of modern

temporality and its structuring monopoly of power relations. More

analyses are obviously needed to account for Full Circle-cum-Moving Beyond the Home for the Elderly, and for many more films presently made in China. Here perhaps is a place for us to pause, in order to

re-view, rethink, and hopefully relearn from the works traced in this

essay and many more coming from an immensely differential land that is never being simply lost while always being in the midst of remaking, as a humanly inhabited city in all its transgenre and intermedial

performances for the homecoming of its citizens.

Notes

1. Glamorous shows depicting "underworld Shanghai," permeated with the

"aura" of a sexualized oriental, have occupied large shares of the national

and international cinematic markets as well as the public visibility through their established discursive and distribution networks. Systematic analyses of such phenomena and the economies of its aesthetics are much needed.

2. For a recent collection of Peng Xiaolian's major film works, see Peng

Xiaolian dianying ji: Shanghai gushi (Peng Xiaolian Works: Shanghai Stories) (Shanghai, 2011).

3. Harry H. Kuoshu's discussion of Peng Xiaolian is particularly noteworthy. See Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China (Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), pp. 86-88.

4. Jiazhuang mei ganjue (Shanghai Women), color, 94 minutes, in Peng

Xiaolian Works: Shanghai Stories. It received the Best Leading Actress

Award, 2002 Nantes International Film Festival, France; and the Best

Feature Film and Best Director Awards, 2003 Torino International Film

Festival, Italy.

5. Prior to the reform, salaries for all professions in urban China were

determined by the state with the principle of "everyone making all his/her

effort, distribution in accordance with labor," and "equal job equal pay." Whether such equality was actually practiced or the question of equal salary




was a prerogative itself, as it was largely an urban category and the divide

between the urban and the rural in terms of state policies for resource

allocation has been decisive in the lives of the majority of Chinese, it is a

fact that "being a school teacher" brought one social respect in urban and

rural China, while salary differences in the cities were kept to a minimum

during the early years of the PRC.

6. Xu Mingxia, Zhan zai shijisui de weibashang (Turning Seventeen). The

author is a young woman who won the first prize with this work at the

annual competition titled Literature of New Concepts (Xin gainian wenxue)

organized in 2000 by the prestigious literary journal for youth in Shanghai,

Mengya (Budding). It was reprinted in 2006 in Bulaohu qingchun wenxue

(Cloth Tiger Youth Literature) (Shanghai: Shanghai chunfeng wenyi

chubanshe, 2006), Issue 1, pp. 114-120.

7. The presence of bicycles and/or their disappearance in Chinese films

produced in the 21st century constitute interesting topics themselves. See

Shiqi sui danche (Beijing Bicycle), directed by Wang Xiaoshuai (2001) and Wuren jiashi (Driverless), directed by Zhang Yang (2010).

8. An important part of studies of critical theory in the U.S. academy, this

topic has led to a large and still growing body of critical literature. For a

foundational and lucid articulation of the complex notions of "acting out"

and "working through," see Dominick LaCapra's "History and

Psychoanalysis," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 1987), pp. 222-251.

9. This phenomenon constitutes a subject for discussion itself. One of the

earlier examples is Nuxing shijie (The Feminine World), directed by Dong

Kena (Shanghai Film Studio, 2001). Beijing Bicycle, directed by Wang Xiaoshuai in 2001, a variation of such a phenomenon, is itself viewed as an

announcement for "the coming of age" of "the sixth generation" of film

directors.

10. This reading, motivated by and emerging from the materials dealt with in

this essay, is also informed by a growing body of scholarship framed with

the cognitive category of "space." Zhang Yingjin's Cinema, Space, and

Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Harry H. Kuoshu's Metro Movies:

Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China, and Tang Xiaobing's Global

Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking

of Liang Qichao, to name a few, offer some of the earliest resources and

important references. While Tang's work is about nationalist discourse in

China and its tension-ridden dialogue with the dominant West as well as

the problematic of time and space central to world historiography rather

than cinema per se, its key argument is critically relevant here.

11. Jia Zhangke, Sanxia haoren (Still Life) (2006). It received the Golden Lion

Award at the 63rd Venice Film Festival, 10 September 2006, Venice, Italy.

12. The plan originated with Dr. Sun Yet-sen, the founding figure of the



130 Haiping Yan

modern China, in 1919, in his Jianguo fanglue (Strategies of Building

Modern China). In the 1940s, the nationalist government signed a contract

with the United States that stipulated collaboration between China and the

United States for the construction of a dam in the region. John Lucian

Savage visited China several times to conduct field research, finally

publishing a report that recommended the project. The domestically and

internationally orchestrated wars prevented the project from commencing at

that time. After the founding of the PRC, Mao Zedong put it on the agenda

in 1953. The proposal for the dam project was approved by the People's

Congress on 3 April 1992. See Liu Guangrun, Liu Guangrun wenji (Collections

of Works by Liu Guangrun) (Beijing: Zhongguo dizhi chubanshe, 2010). 13. The place is a recurring site in Chinese classical poetry, particularly since

the Tang dynasty. Li Bai is one of the most renowned Tang poets. Qu

Yuan's temple centrally located in the city is representative of the ancient

architecture rich with historical memories.

14. It is reasonable and perhaps necessary to consider whether the total figure

is higher than the officially reported figure. More research is needed.

15. "Tang people," an established term in Chinese, means "Chinese people," as

general human descendants of the Tang dynasty.

16. "Naive cinema," as some scholars put it. See Fredric Jameson, The

Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1992).

17. For scholarship in English on Jia Zhangke that sheds light on such issues,

see Zhang Xudong, "Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke," New

Left Review, Vol. 63 (May/June 2010), pp. 71-88. For informative and

rigorous scholarship on "the sixth generation" of film directors with focused

attention on the conditions of "postsocialism," see Chris Berry, "Getting

Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism," in The Urban

Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First

Century, edited by Zhang Zhen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2007), pp. 115-136; Jason McGrath, "'Independent' Cinema: From

Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic," in Postsocialist

Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 129-164; Yingjin

Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

18. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso. 1998).

19. The city of Fengjie in the heart of the Three Gorges region was designated

in 1997 as part of the Chongqing metropolis, while the status of Chongqing

was then elevated to the equivalent of a province, similar to the cities of

Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjing, as a municipality directly under the central

government.




20. Tang Xiaobing's analysis of the Hegelian logic of time is directly relevant

here. His critique of how such logic valorizes temporal homogeneity and

systematically hierarchizes world geography through and into the operative

of a universal, historicist time is an astute critique of Hegel as much as an

intricate explication of Marxism and its Chinese versions. See Global Space

and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity (231).

21. This is of course one reading of the nature of the dramatic genre and

Brecht's relation to it, a reading directly taken from Alain Badiou. The

complexity of Brecht and his method, and the Brechtian legacy in the

context of the twentieth century as a whole, is irreducible to any particular

analysis. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge:

Policy Press, 2007). 22. Such a take on drama and its nature is one among many available variables.

Its pertinence here is due to the historical fact that one of the characteristic

practices of modern and contemporary Chinese arts, of which Still Life is a

most recent instance, is predicated upon the intellectual legacy of a Marxist

tradition, which establishes such a take. Also see Georg Lukacs, The Theory

of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) and his self-critical "Preface"

and The Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1967).

23. Kewang (Yearning) (Beijing: CCTV, 1990). 24. Shanghai tan (The Bund) (Hong Kong: TVB, 1980).

25. See "Sanxia de weida renmin" (The Great People of the Three Gorges

Region) (Sichuan dianshitai, 20 June 2003). 26. In a dialogue, Jia Zhangke answers the question posed to him about the

nature and meaning of this entity flying across the sky: "I don't know what

it is." See Yang Wenhuo, "Jia Zhangke sanxia haoren chuangzuotan" (Still

Life: Jia Zhangke on Making the Film), Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao

(Journal of the Beijing Film Academy), Issue 2 (2007). 27. The mixed economy as a mode of production, operating in China since the

reform, has brought about an institutional ambiguity in terms of the

organizational functions of such agencies as the workers' unions. The

nature of such agencies defined in a state-planned economy earlier is

refunctioned, often in problematic and confusing ways, in order for them to

serve as intermediaries between the workers and their new bosses as now

private owners of these factories. See Chang Kai and Qiao Jian, eds.,

Gonghui yanjiu (New Edition: Studies on Workers' Unions) (Beijing:

Renmin chubanshe, 2000); Chang Kai, ed., WTO: Laogong quanyi

baozhang (WTO: On Protecting Workers' Rights) (Beijing: Zhongguo

gongren chubanshe, 2011); Zhongguo gongren jieji de mingyun (The Fate

of the Chinese Working Class: Social Actions of the Workers since the

Reform) (Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 2002); Chang Kai, ed.,

Zhongguo jingyan (The Chinese Experiences: Company-Management and



132 Haiping Yan

Workers' Participation in a Society in Transformation) (Beijing: Shehui

kexue chubanshe, 2005). Presently, workers in state-owned and collective

owned companies constitute one-fourth of all workers nationwide; the rest

belong to private, foreign, and town-village factories. There are

approximately 150 million migrant workers from the rural regions working

in urban China. Laid-off workers from state-owned factories have

constituted one of the major social issues since the 1990s.

28. For the earliest occurrence of the category of "Mountains of Wu Regions"

in written documents, see Shanhaijing (Books of Mountains and Oceans) (Qin

dynasty, 221 BC); Yuan Ke, ed. and annotator, Shanhaijing (Books of

Mountains and Oceans) (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishers, Shanghai

guji chubanshe, 1985). Scholars have long explored and argued about how

the category of the "Mountains of Wu Regions" in Books, not only to

denote a geographical region but also to connote a cultural-cum-spiritual

path, through which the shamans are said to have traveled between the

heaven and the earth. In early ancient (2070-760 BC) Chinese history, "spirit"

and "shaman" are interchangeable words.

29. Tea drinking began with Shen Nong (the mythological teacher of farming)

and became widespread by the time of the Duke of Zhou in Lu state during

the Warring States period (770-221 BC). See Lu Yu, Chajing (Books of

Tea) (Tang dynasty, 780 AD). Before the Warring States period, tea making

and tea drinking were developed and matured in southwestern China and

subsequently expanded during the Jin and North-South dynasties in the

regions south of the Yangtze River. The center of production has been the

southwest, now the heartland of Sichuan province. See Gao Fachang, Gu

liudachashan shikao (A Genealogy of Six Ancient Tea Mountains) (Kunmin:

Fine Arts Publishers, 2010). While tea making was the sphere of labor for

tea peasants, the records of elaborate tea ceremonies were written primarily

by the literati during imperial China. Since the Song dynasty (AD

960-1279) tea drinking-cum-tea sharing as a method of social communication

has been popular among ordinary Chinese, as many varieties of tea have been

cultivated. See Zhang Yuan, Cha lu (Tea Records) (1595). Since the

founding of the PRC, tea drinking-cum-tea sharing has been established and

practiced as a defining way of collective communication.

30. This is a much generalized statement that of course requires specifications

and sustained analyses. Generalized as it is, however, such a statement is

not erroneously reductive, particularly in terms of the social and

institutional functions of "tea," "wine," and "cigarette" in contemporary

China, a topic of cultural importance beyond the scope of this essay. 31. See notes 27 and 28.

32. Deng dao manshan hongye shi (When Leaves Turn Red on the Mountains),

directed by Tang Huada and Yu Benzheng (Shanghai Film Studio, 1980).




33. The apogee for the returning youth was the late 1970s. The whole period

lasted well into the 1980s. Some of the "sent-down youth" never managed to

return successfully. Some chose not to return and remained in rural China.

See Wang Anyi's fiction, "Benci lieche zhongdian" (The Destination of this

Train), in Shanghai wenxue (Shanghai Literature), October Issue (1981).

34. See Ye Xin's novel Nie zhai (Sinful Debt) (Jiangsu: Jiangsu wenyi

chubanshe, 1992). Sixteen years later, he published a follow-up, Nie zhai er

(Sinful Debt II) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2008). 35. The entire canon called "literature of the sent-down youth" (Xiaxiang

zhiqing wenxue) constitutes one of the central legacies of contemporary

Chinese literature since the reform. Wang Anyi, Ye Xin, Liang Xiaosheng,

the late Lu Yao, Han Shaogong, and Tie Ning, to name a few, are the

luminaries of this generation of powerful literary authors. See Xinwenxue

daxi, juan 12, xiaoshuo (Series of New Chinese Literature, Collection 12:

Novella) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2009).

36. See Paul Turner, trans, and intro., Thomas More, Utopia (New York:

Penguin Classics, 1965). This is a keynote in a tradition critical of modern

English and European modernity. Cf. Raymond Williams, Culture and

Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.25.

37. It is important to trace recently unfolding discussions on "the consensus for

reform in the 1980s" as a way of addressing the perceived lack of "social

consensus" in the present moment.

38. The policy makers are presently legislating new programs for the migrant

workers and their children in urban China to obtain legal rights, ranging

from schooling to medical insurance to registration as permanent residents.

See "Tongchou chengxiang fazhan de shixian lujing" (On Implementing

Programs for Coordinated Development of Both Rural and Urban Areas"),

E-beifang wang (E-North Web), 29 January 2012. Also see "Di shiyi jie

renmin daibiao dahui diwuci huiyi" ("Work Report"), by Premier Wen

Jiabao, delivered at the Fifth Meeting of the Eleventh People's Congress,

Beijing, 5 March 2012. The report emphasizes the areas of formal schooling

and employment, leaving medical insurance and permanent resident status

unspecified.

39. Patterned after a British brand, Da baitu naitang (White Rabbits) was

invented by Aipixi Plant in 1943 and called ABC Mickey Mouse at its

beginnings. After the PRC was founded in 1949, the company was

nationalized. In the following years, ABC Mickey Mouse was further

revised and, in 1959, renamed as White Rabbits, while becoming the most

popular version in its history. In 1972, when President Richard Nixon

visited China, Premier Zhou Enlai chose it as a gift for the American

visitor. White Rabbits has been rapidly expanding its market shares

throughout the reform era and is presently furthering its status as the most



134 Haiping Yan

popular Chinese brand within and outside China proper. A systematic and

sustained study of this production history is much needed, both as an

important part of Chinese economic history and, as this reading of Still Life

preliminarily intimates, for Chinese cinematic, artistic, social, and cultural

history.

40. Jia Zhangke, "Xuanya bian de chushi" (A Cook at the Edge of an Abyss),

Nanfang wang (The South Web), 20 September 2006, p. 19, http://ent.sina.

com.cn.

41. Work-related injuries in ill-regulated small coal mines in Shanxi province

have received intense public attention since the 1990s. Working in such

coal mines was during the 1990s a precarious way to make a living due to

work-related incidents and injuries, often fatal. Due to public pressure and

government efforts, the working conditions of coal miners in Shanxi

province reportedly have been improving. See "Shanxi meikuang zhendun

guanbi he meitan ziyuan zhenhe qude zhongda jinzhan" (Important

Development in the Reorganization of Coal Mines and Consolidation of

Resources in Shanxi), Zhongguo meitan shichang wang (Chinese Markets

for Coal Web), 1 April 2008, www.cctd.com.cn. For a recent report on

workers' safety issues, see Song Feihong and Qi Ming, "Shanxi fugu

meikuang shigu xu" (A Follow-Up on the Incidents at Fugu Coal Mines of

Shanxi), Huashang bao (Chinese Business Daily), 31 May 2012. Li Yang's

film Mang jing (Blind Shaft) (2003) is an often-noted work bearing on the

topic.

42. Wo jianqiang de xiaochuan (Kids in Shanghai), directed by Peng Xiaolian,

traces the lives of three young people coming from distinctly different and

inherently related formative contexts: that of rural China, the city of

Shanghai, and Asian-cum-Chinese America. See Peng Xiaolian, Peng

Xiaolian dianying ji. Haishanghua (I Wish I Knew), directed by Jia

Zhangke (2010), focuses on Shanghai and its history.

43. Such a cross-disciplinary method inherently involves the fields of

economics, political economy, and cultural sociology, which is much

needed and beyond the scope of this essay. I have encountered such

questions over the past several years when presenting my academic work

tracing the enabling dimensions of present Chinese society as registered in

the arts at national conferences in the United States, including the Annual

Convention of Performance Studies International in Toronto, June 2010.

Emerging young scholars in Shanghai have been developing some of their

scholarly works in such cross-disciplinary directions. See "The Post-80s

Cultural Shanghai," an ongoing workshop at SJTU Institute for Advanced

Studies in Media and Society, Shanghai Jiaotong University, September

November 2012.

44. The payment he receives is about 10,000 renminbi per film, about 3,000




renminbi more than his annual income as a cola miner. See “Han Sanming:

Filming Is After-Hours，My Job Is a Coal Miner，，，Jinyang Wang (Jinyang Web), 8 December 2006，ycwb.com.

45. For a detailed articulation of this aesthetic tradition in Chinese theatre and

its relation to our critical understanding of social behavior in life, see Yan

Haiping, "Theatricality in Chinese Classical Drama," in Theatricality, edited by Tracy Davis (London: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.

65-89. 46. See Peng Xiaolian, Notes on Shanghai Women (manuscript notebook); "Lu

Liping，，，Baidu, http://baike.baidu.com/view/206842.htm. 47. Research on online fan clubs of various kinds and the aesthetics of audience

making constitutes a fast-growing field in contemporary studies of Chinese

cinema and the performing arts, as well as studies of politics. Prime

Minister Wen Jiabao and the CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao have their

respectively orchestrated "online dialogues with web-citizens."

48. Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 108-109.

49. Feiyue laoren yuan (Full Circle), directed by Zhang Yang (2012).

50. Zhang Guangchun, "Reflection on the Alienation of Popular Youth

Culture，，，Lingnan shuanyuekan (Lingnan Bimonthly), No. 3 (2009)，pp.

124-127. Much of the advocacy for “mature culture" in opposition to

"under-age culture” made by cultural critics such as Gan Yang and others,

in this sense, is socially symptomatic as it is culturally constructive in its

impetus.

51. Jianghai yi shewen, “Ruguo you yitian wo laowu suoyi" (If One Day, I Am

Aging), Douban shequ (Douban community), 8 May 2012.

52. Jia Zhangke, Jiaxiang (Jia's Thought) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2009), 201.

53. I would like to list these names in Chinese here as a gesture of personal

appreciation as well as an act of bilingual and cross-cultural archiving:許

還山、吳天明、蔡鴻翔、王德順、唐佐輝、李濱、田華、管宗祥、陶玉玲、

劉江、賈鳳森、黃素影、張華勳、江化霖（late)並夫人、仲星火夫婦.The

list continues.



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