Yangtze director Yung Chang will be in attendance at the Globe Cinema this Friday and Saturday
Compelling Canadian-helmed documentary looks at China’s future
Until late 2006 “farewell cruises” along the Yangtze River were a popular — if somewhat morbid – tourist activity. Visitors from the world over set sail on luxury liners for one last glimpse of the cities rural areas and historical monuments that would be flooded upon completion of the Three Gorges Dam — the largest hydro-electric project in the world. In Canadian director Yung Chang’s eyes there could hardly be a better metaphor for China’s current path. The cruises provide a glimpse at the results of the nation’s ambition and modernization along with its seeming disregard for what it takes to get there.
Yung wisely chooses to let these complex issues play out as a backdrop to a very human drama in his documentary Up the Yangtze. The film primarily focuses on Yu Shui a young Chinese girl whose family earns its living through subsistence farming on land set to be flooded by the dam. Yu’s family can’t afford to send her to high school (they can hardly afford shelter for themselves) so after she finishes middle school she has to find work ending up employed on one of the cruise lines.
There are a number of cringe-inducing scenes on the ship and the overtones of cultural imperialism are impossible to ignore but Yung is careful to convey that this is in fact an opportunity for Yu to provide for her future. Though she doesn’t say much Yu has a hard time hiding her emotions from the camera in both her body language and facial expression and her initial distaste for the work and her enjoyment of the friendship and opportunity it provides are abundantly clear and oddly endearing.
Chen Bo Yu the documentary’s other main subject is not so charming. Though handsome and a proficient English speaker — two qualities that position him for the prime tip-earning jobs on Yu’s ship — he’s also cocky and more than a little arrogant. Like Yu Chen’s family will be displaced by the flooding. Unlike her his family is wealthy enough that it seems like a mere inconvenience and he ends up more concerned with developing strategies to pull in the biggest tips.
Chen and Yu each represent the new face of China in their own way. For Chen the nation’s relatively newfound openness to foreign trade and tourism is an opportunity to indulge in a western lifestyle. For Yu it’s at least a chance to move up from the poverty she’s known for her whole life though the hardships her family endures as a result of the damming make the opportunity more questionable. For both navigating the new China won’t be simple — but as one of the film’s interviewees says “it’s hard being a human but being a common person in China is even more difficult.”