I am very glad to see that this documentary is not an over-melodrama of the the livelihood of migrant workers. Unlike China Blue which, from an Eurocentric point of view, describes young Chinese migrant women as if they are people with no agency, but unfortunate victims of oppression and exploitation, this film provides a much balanced picture of the work and life of a migrant family. Besides showing without reservation the hardship and difficulties rural migrants from Southwest China face working in Southern China (Guangdong), the film demonstrates the humorous, loving, caring, vigorous aspects of the migrants. They are full human beings with joy, pain, love, hatred, tears and laughter. They curse, but they also pray. They (some of them) are aware of the exploitation they are subject to, but they try to make the best out of the worst. They have full control of their own lives. They know what they are doing.
T he camera lens extends beyond the sweatshops to the inner family conflicts, especially the parents-daughter relationship and the psychological trauma of left-behind children. What touches me most is when Qin (the daughter), before leaving home to become a migrant worker, burned paper money and joss sticks in front of the tomb of her grandpa, the one who, she thought, had loved her more than her parents. From here, the film reveals step by step the family history, the inharmonious relationship between left-behind daughter and the migrant parents. What you want is just money! You will never stay and take care of us (her and the younger brother)! The daughter yelled at her parents when they came back home for the spring festival. The father beat her down to the ground; the mother scolded her and had no intention to stop the father...Yet in many other scenes, the parents were sincerely worried about the daughter. The father, despite of his bus sick, made a trip in bus to go to the daughter's workplace and tried to persuade her to continue her education. And the mother tried to tell the daughter the "truth" about life, the bitterness of migrant life, and the dark side of the "Freedom" of "floating" in the labor market. But because she does not know how to communicate with the child, and because of the deep-rooted misunderstanding and detachment between them, her harsh tone sounds almost like giving an order. No wonder the daughter resisted when she reached the adulthood. And she resisted by curse, violence, and self-exile.
The film does a great job showing the devastating consequences migration brings to rural China, to the families, and to the children of migrant households. The lack of communication between migrant parents and left-behind children, as the unavoidable consequence of migration, has become the cancer of Chinese family harmony and happiness. Qin's experience also reminds us this inconvenient truth -- the left-behind children, with all their uncured wounds inside, are becoming next generation of migrants. Are they going to leave their own children behind too? Is history repeat itself so conveniently here? Can we rely on these angry, wounded, and traumatized adults to produce a happy, loving, self-confident next generation?
I've been observing the daughter's face expressions throughout the film watching. Her hair style, her clothes, and her height were changing over the three years. Yet her face expression doesn't change that drastically, especially when she was alone. Her eyes, big and round, had this emptiness and hollowness deep inside. She didn't smile much. The most relaxing moment for her is when she lied down and talked to her best friend, a rural young migrant woman in her age. Seeing she dancing disco along with the beats under the bizarre ballroom lights, with her hollow eyes and motionless expression, my heart ached.
It also struck me that, the parents want both the daughter and the younger son to continue education. The daughter dropped out of school and became a migrant not because she was forced to, but because she chose to. And she chose it not because of she wanted to save money for her younger brother's college education (although that's one possibility in the future), but because of her traumatic childhood experience which caused her strong desire to leave home. This is an aspect of rural life that not many documentary about China have paid attention to. Given the great Western scholarly and media attention to China's son preference, esp. in the countryside, such an unusual representation of rural family dynamics is indeed precious.
